Title: An Introduction to OceanWorks
Presenting Author: Thomas Huang
Organization: Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Co-Author(s): Edward M. Armstrong/JPL Joseph C. Jacob/JPL Nga T. Quach/JPL Vardis M. Tsontos/JPL Brian Wilson/JPL Shawn Smith/JPL Mark A. Bourassa/JPL Steve J. Worley/NCAR Chaowei Yang/GMU Yongyao Jiang/GMU Yun Li/GMU

Abstract:
This presentation will provide an overview of OceanWorks, the webservice platform for big ocean data science at the Physical Oceanography Distributed Active Archive Center (PO.DAAC), and to discuss the open source solutions that OceanWorks uses to enable fast analysis of oceanographic data. OceanWorks will be developed collaboratively between JPL, FSU, NCAR, and GMU. It will be the platform for the next generation of PO.DAAC data solutions. The platform is an orchestration of several previous funded NASA big ocean data solutions using cloud technology, which include data analysis (NEXUS), anomaly detection (OceanXtremes), matchup (DOMS), subsetting, discovery (MUDROD), and visualization. With increasing global temperature, warming of the ocean, and melting ice sheets and glaciers, the impacts can be observed from changes in anomalous ocean temperature and circulation patterns, to increasing extreme weather events and super hurricanes, sea level rise and storm surges affecting coastlines, and may involve drastic changes and shifts in marine ecosystems. Ocean science communities are relying on data distributed through data centers such as the PO.DAAC to conduct their research. In typical investigations, oceanographers follow a traditional workflow for using datasets: search, evaluate, download, and apply tools and algorithms to look for trends. While this workflow has been working very well historically for the oceanographic community, it cannot scale if the research involves massive amount of data. NASA's Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission, scheduled to launch in April of 2021, is expected to generate over 20PB data for a nominal 3-year mission. This will challenge all existing NASA Earth Science data archival/distribution paradigms. It will no longer be feasible for Earth scientists to download and analyze such volumes of data. OceanWorks will enable web-accessible, fast data analysis directly on our physical ocean archive to minimize data movement and provide access, including subset, only to the relevant data.