Cal-Adapt - Building California’s Resilience to Climate Change through Open Data

Cal-Adapt provides access to peer-reviewed, high quality climate data and information for California through climate tools, data visualizations and data downloads. These datasets and resources are produced and contributed by a range of organizations and scientists from California’s scientific and research community. Cal-Adapt is used by a variety of users for evaluating climate related risks and vulnerabilities to California’s infrastructure, communities, and natural resources.

The Cal-Adapt website is developed by the Geospatial Innovation Facility (GIF) at University of California, Berkeley with funding and advisory oversight by California Energy Commission (CEC). Cal-Adapt’s development was a key recommendation of the 2009 California Climate Adaptation Strategy and is identified as a key resource in California’s Fourth Climate Change Assessment.

The GIF was recently awarded AWS Cloud Credits for Research to explore, prototype, and develop the use of distributed cloud computing resources to build the next-generation of Cal-Adapt which will provide users with fast, dynamic, interactive exploration of climate variables. Climate science is quickly evolving, and new datasets generated by the research community are of increasingly high spatial and temporal resolution. The Cal-Adapt team is exploring the use of AWS Lambda functions and integrated Amazon S3 storage to speed up the dynamic spatial subsetting, temporal aggregations, and summarization of these high resolution climate datasets by partitioning tasks among a collection of nodes which handle the workload in parallel.

In addition to enabling novel and creative ways of exploring climate data, Cal-Adapt also acts as a digital repository for much of the climate and environmental research sponsored by the State of California. The data available on Cal-Adapt offer a view of how climate change might affect California at the local level and includes diverse research material from statistically downscaled climate models to demographic information at the census tract level that identifies vulnerable communities (CalEnviroScreen). Our users have a wide range of technical expertise and requirements for working with climate data. To support them, Cal-Adapt provides data downloads in a variety of different formats including CSV, NetCDF, and GeoTIFF and data summaries by region of interest, temporal interval, and level of temporal aggregation (monthly, annual, or decadal averages). The approach we’re taking with AWS allows us to support the development of improved data access tools for our users and enable them to easily extract just the data they need for their specific climate resiliency efforts. Improving our ability to provide targeted climate and environmental informatics is a critical step forward to promote effective and integrated action to safeguard California from climate change.