Thursday, August 21, 2014

Advanced Training Course in Data assimilation and visualization in environmental sciences 15-19 Sep 2014

Fully-funded places are available for a NERC-funded advanced training course in Data assimilation and visualization in environmental sciences, to be held in the School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences at the University of Reading, 15 -19 September 2014. The course will be delivered by scientists from the Data Assimilation Research Centre (DARC) from the University of Reading. The course is aimed at PhD students and early career researchers who are working in application areas and who wish to use data-assimilation and visualization techniques as part of their work.

Full details can be found here: http://www.reading.ac.uk/maths-and-stats/news/DA_Course.aspx

Tuesday, July 1, 2014

NERC Short Course on Software Development

We will be offering a short course in software development, aimed at environmental scientists.

Software engineering is a large and complex discipline and so this NERC short course will focus on the most important and relevant elements for scientists, crucial amongst which are usability, maintainability, accuracy, and readability. These are the foundations of professional code development skills.  We will teach and demonstrate the benefits of good initial design, thorough testing, algorithm re-use and code progression, the ideas of elegance, abstraction, performance and scalability.

There will be two levels to run sequentially with the caveat that applicants for the second level must demonstrate competence at the first level through use of an online assessment.

The courses are aimed principally at PhD students and early career scientists, but all applications will be considered.

Please see http://www.resc.rdg.ac.uk/training/training_main.php for full details.

Wednesday, February 19, 2014

Big Data Management and Visualization workshop, Harwell, 12th March 2014

Jon Blower will be presenting on ncWMS and the GeoViQua project at this workshop - see below for details. Thanks to Olly Clements and the teams at PML and the EarthServer project for putting this together!


Big Data Management and Visualisation - Earth Observation Community Workshop
Space Application Catapult - Harwell, Oxfordshire
12th March 2014


Overview
This free, one day, technical workshop is aimed at groups/teams that are developing or working with systems used to manage the storage, delivery and visualisation of large scale data sets. The workshop will focus on new/emerging technologies and techniques aimed at providing solutions for the management of big data.

Data are being created at faster and faster rates. To make use of these data new systems and paradigms need to be used to ensure that the maximum benefit can be obtained from the data. This workshop will focus on two elements of these emerging systems; storage/query of large scale data and effective visualisation of the data.

Participation/Registration
To register your interest for either attending or presenting your work, please visit http://earthserver.pml.ac.uk/big_data_workshop and follow the information there.

Monday, September 30, 2013

ncWMS now available on OSGeo-Live DVD 7.0

ReSC's ncWMS software is now available packaged with the excellent OSGeo-Live DVD. This is:

"a self-contained bootable DVD, USB thumb drive or Virtual Machine based on Xubuntu, that allows you to try a wide variety of open source geospatial software without installing anything. It is composed entirely of free software, allowing it to be freely distributed, duplicated and passed around. It provides pre-configured applications for a range of geospatial use cases, including storage, publishing, viewing, analysis and manipulation of data. It also contains sample datasets and documentation."
(quotes from the OSGeo-Live website)

The DVD contains a pre-installed version of ncWMS together with sample data. Thanks to Cameron Shorter and Guy Griffiths for making this happen!

Wednesday, July 31, 2013

Workshop on Citizen Science, Royal Society, 13th September 2013

eResearch South will be hosting a 1 day workshop on the 13th September 2013 at the Royal Society, London to investigate the current state and future of Citizen Science as a research methodology. This event will bring together leading researchers from climateprediction.net, Galaxy Zoo, Old Weather and SOCIAM to discuss their success and insights alongside an interactive day where will be chart where this paradigm can go.

The event will close with a reception to celebrate 10 years of climate prediction.net with guest speakers from some of the sponsoring media organisations and the project volunteers.

Please see the e-Research South website for details and registration: http://www.eresearchsouth.ac.uk/events/current-and-future-directions-of-citizen-science.

Monday, June 24, 2013

Paper on ncWMS published in Environmental Modelling and Software

A paper describing ReSC's ncWMS software has been published in Environmental Modelling and Software as an Open Access paper.  This is the paper to use as the primary means of citing ncWMS in the literature.

DOI
10.1016/j.envsoft.2013.04.002

Citation
J.D. Blower, A.L. Gemmell, G.H. Griffiths, K. Haines, A. Santokhee, X. Yang, A Web Map Service implementation for the visualization of multidimensional gridded environmental data.  Environmental Modelling & Software, Volume 47, September 2013, Pages 218–224

Abstract
We describe ncWMS, an implementation of the Open Geospatial Consortium's Web Map Service (WMS) specification for multidimensional gridded environmental data. ncWMS can read data in a large number of common scientific data formats – notably the NetCDF format with the Climate and Forecast conventions – then efficiently generate map imagery in thousands of different coordinate reference systems. It is designed to require minimal configuration from the system administrator and, when used in conjunction with a suitable client tool, provides end users with an interactive means for visualizing data without the need to download large files or interpret complex metadata. It is also used as a “bridging” tool providing interoperability between the environmental science community and users of geographic information systems. ncWMS implements a number of extensions to the WMS standard in order to fulfil some common scientific requirements, including the ability to generate plots representing timeseries and vertical sections. We discuss these extensions and their impact upon present and future interoperability. We discuss the conceptual mapping between the WMS data model and the data models used by gridded data formats, highlighting areas in which the mapping is incomplete or ambiguous. We discuss the architecture of the system and particular technical innovations of note, including the algorithms used for fast data reading and image generation. ncWMS has been widely adopted within the environmental data community and we discuss some of the ways in which the software is integrated within data infrastructures and portals.

Thursday, November 15, 2012

Two new job opportunities

As part of the upcoming EU-funded CHARMe project (led by the University of Reading) we are seeking two new members of staff (one researcher and one project coordinator), to work closely with the ReSC and the National Centre for Earth Observation. See the ReSC jobs page for more details.