Kitware Receives Phase II Funding to Further Develop ClimatePipes

Kitware is pleased to announce the award of $1M in Phase II funding from the U.S. Department of Energy to further develop ClimatePipes, a platform for providing non-researchers with access to and analysis tools for understanding long-term climate change projections. For this project, Kitware will collaborate with researchers at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University.

The pace of global climate change is expected to accelerate and impact the fields of public health, infrastructure, water resources, and more. In recent years, multitudes of climate data have been collected as part of the U.S. Global Change Research Program and the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP); however, hurdles including large data size, a lack of adequate metadata, poor documentation, and insufficient computational and visualization resources have limited research progress in this area.

Upon completion, ClimatePipes will make valuable climate data available to non-researchers including policy makers, health officials, agriculturists, and industry leaders. Users will be able to run complex computations and visualizations in the cloud or on a user-provided cluster, and upload data to a server for analysis and integration.

In Phase I, ClimatePipes was developed as a web-based workflow with interfaces for accessing, querying, and visualizing datasets from one-or-more sources. In Phase II, Kitware will implement support mechanisms for more elaborate and relevant queries, and improve the system’s usability, robustness, and scalability. Advanced querying will be supported by a semantic search tool that relies on natural language processing techniques.

“Climate research is currently impeded by barriers that can be relieved with capable software,” said Dr. Berk Geveci, Director of Scientific Computing at Kitware and Principal Investigator on this project. “ClimatePipes will remove those barriers, enabling the public to explore climate data on their own and take part in the larger conversation about climate change.”

“We are providing climate researchers and non-researchers with the state-of-the-art tools they need to make sense of climate change and its potential impacts,” said Aashish Chaudhary, Project Leader on ClimatePipes. “We are proud to be working on a project that may benefit the world at large.”

This work has been supported by the Department of Energy (DOE) under award number DE-SC0006493.