Web Processing Services for the Climate Science Community supported by Birdhouse

Climate analyses often require the processing of large data from climate model simulations and observation data. Nowadays, researchers download data from climate data archives and try to process those files at their home institutes with local analysis software. But with the growing amount of climate data this is not a feasible solution. With the upcoming climate model simulations projects (e.g. CMIP6) even larger climate institutes and computing centers will not be able to keep all relevant data on one storage system. Climate processing services can be a valuable contribution to cope with the growing data challenge. A set of climate analyses processing tools can be installed close to the climate data archives. These processing tools are provided as services, which can be accessed via the web. Here, standardized interfaces are important to enable processing services among several institutes interested in climate data. Furthermore a standard processing interface enables the chaining of processes cross-institutional. Besides sharing the processing services, this gives also the opportunity to share the knowledge (and software) on climate processing among researchers and institutes. By this “reinvented wheels” can be reduced and the software quality can be enhanced. This does not restrict the researchers from choosing their favorite processing tools. Using a standard processing service interface decouples the processing tools (including programming languages, operating systems) from the service itself, and there are also several implementations of the service provider software available. In Birdhouse we show how the Web Processing Service (WPS) standard can be used to realize services for climate processing tools. WPS is an open standard defined by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) with several open source implementations. In Birdhouse we currently use the Python implementation of WPS, “PyWPS”, but Birdhouse is not restricted to a single WPS implementation. Birdhouse is not yet another processing framework, ...