About> GIF News Feed
GIF News Feed
GIF at the White House Climate Data Initiative Launch
On March 19th, the White House launched the President’s Climate Data Initiative in order to “empower America’s communities for the effects of climate change.” Our Faculty Director Maggi Kelly and I, along with the California Energy Commission's Guido Franco, were invited to participate in the launch event, an engaging day with an important goal. White House officials have taken great interest in the efforts that the State of California has taken over the last decade to develop comprehensive climate change research that helps guide adaptation planning efforts at the local level. In particular, the Cal-Adapt web application developed here at the GIF has been identified as a model tool that may be used to guide the development of future web based products that aim to fill the same goals for different regions.
Prior to the launch event, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and Council on Environmental Quality convened a Climate Data Innovation workshop. It was a great opportunity to foster a dialogue between technologists, scientists, and local decision makers from across the country with a variety of experiences and expertise, all focusing on the future of enabling climate change data analysis at the local level. I was thrilled to give a demonstration of Cal-Adapt’s capabilities to the participants.
During the brief presentation, I highlighted the variety of tools available in the site that cover different aspects of how temperature, sea level rise, snowpack, precipitation, and wildfire risk are projected to change in California, and how Cal-Adapt was developed to help planners and decision makers throughout the State better understand the impacts that are projected to occur in their communities. I ended with a mention of what is in store for the future of the site, including the upcoming publication of a RESTful API that will enable web developers from any organization to programmatically tap into Cal-Adapt’s data and map resources to build their own tools.
View a short video demonstration here:
Through publishing a RESTful API, we will no longer be limiting the development of Cal-Adapt tools to our own development team. Indeed anyone will be able to leverage the powerful and open resources abound online to make their own tools that answer the very specific problems that are important to them. These developers will also be able to “mash up” our data and services with others to explore topics that are not possible without additional information. Check out Maggi's blog for more info and links to the presentations.
After the workshop, the White House hosted a launch event that featured several notable speakers from the administration and technology sectors. It was fantastic to see the energy and commitment that everyone is bringing to this ultimate challenge and I am thrilled at the prospect that a broad community of engaged people are coming together to take it on.
In addition to developing Cal-Adapt, the GIF has taken on projects that include several notable national efforts. We are working with USGS to host visualization and analysis tools for their LandCarbon program. We are developing the Berkeley Ecoinformatics Engine to integrate UC Berkeley’s vast biological data resources. And most recently, we are working with the NASA Earth Exchange to build API and visualization resources for their amazing wealth of data. Though these projects focus on different themes, they are unified by a common element: helping people better understand our changing world. We will continue to seek ways to leverage and connect our projects to ensure the successful outcomes. I look forward to seeing many more projects develop as a result of the Climate Data Initiative and hope that our facility may continue to contribute to the effort in a meaningful way.
Kevin Koy
Executive Director
Prior to the launch event, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and Council on Environmental Quality convened a Climate Data Innovation workshop. It was a great opportunity to foster a dialogue between technologists, scientists, and local decision makers from across the country with a variety of experiences and expertise, all focusing on the future of enabling climate change data analysis at the local level. I was thrilled to give a demonstration of Cal-Adapt’s capabilities to the participants.
 |
| Photo taken during the workshop by NASA’s Beth Beck (via twitter) |
During the brief presentation, I highlighted the variety of tools available in the site that cover different aspects of how temperature, sea level rise, snowpack, precipitation, and wildfire risk are projected to change in California, and how Cal-Adapt was developed to help planners and decision makers throughout the State better understand the impacts that are projected to occur in their communities. I ended with a mention of what is in store for the future of the site, including the upcoming publication of a RESTful API that will enable web developers from any organization to programmatically tap into Cal-Adapt’s data and map resources to build their own tools.
View a short video demonstration here:
After the presentations, including additional speakers from Google, ESRI, and Open Source efforts, the decision makers were given the opportunity to voice their needs in terms of the type of data and tools that they may require to address the climate change concerns that they have for their cities and constituents. Several speakers talked of their need for even the most basic information to identify where risks may be present at a household level. Based on these discussions, as well as break out groups, it became clearer to me that the API approach to serving authoritative climate data is the best way forward to provide resources that can address the most pressing concerns and benefit the most people.
Our development team faced this same dilemma, how to build web-based tools that can answer every possible questions and situation that users may have, when working on early builds of Cal-Adapt nearly three years ago. While we host a variety of tools that allow for the visualization of different types of data, there will always be more data sets that are not able to be presented in a particular way, and there will always be a need for the tools to deliver different functionality. The problem is that the data and features that are requested by users are limitless, and may only serve the needs of very few; however, our development time to dedicate to these requests is finite.
Through publishing a RESTful API, we will no longer be limiting the development of Cal-Adapt tools to our own development team. Indeed anyone will be able to leverage the powerful and open resources abound online to make their own tools that answer the very specific problems that are important to them. These developers will also be able to “mash up” our data and services with others to explore topics that are not possible without additional information. Check out Maggi's blog for more info and links to the presentations.
After the workshop, the White House hosted a launch event that featured several notable speakers from the administration and technology sectors. It was fantastic to see the energy and commitment that everyone is bringing to this ultimate challenge and I am thrilled at the prospect that a broad community of engaged people are coming together to take it on.
In addition to developing Cal-Adapt, the GIF has taken on projects that include several notable national efforts. We are working with USGS to host visualization and analysis tools for their LandCarbon program. We are developing the Berkeley Ecoinformatics Engine to integrate UC Berkeley’s vast biological data resources. And most recently, we are working with the NASA Earth Exchange to build API and visualization resources for their amazing wealth of data. Though these projects focus on different themes, they are unified by a common element: helping people better understand our changing world. We will continue to seek ways to leverage and connect our projects to ensure the successful outcomes. I look forward to seeing many more projects develop as a result of the Climate Data Initiative and hope that our facility may continue to contribute to the effort in a meaningful way.
Kevin Koy
Executive Director
Archives
May 2010 August 2010 September 2010 June 2011 July 2011 September 2013 January 2014 April 2014 March 2015 September 2015 October 2015 December 2015 January 2016 November 2016 January 2017 August 2017 November 2017 January 2018 August 2018 January 2019 August 2019 March 2020 October 2021 October 2023