e-Science paper wins Lloyds "Science of Risk" climate change prize

Dr Simon Gosling from the University of Reading's Walker Institute has been awarded ‘best paper' in the climate change category of the Lloyds ‘Science of Risk' prize.

Dr Gosling was awarded the prize for his paper on climate change and water scarcity published earlier this year. The research demonstrates where there is strong agreement across climate models that river flows will decrease and water scarcity will increase (e.g. western Europe and the Mediterranean) as well as highlighting where there is relatively more uncertainty in how these risks will change (e.g. south-eastern China). The paper was led by Dr Gosling and co-authored with Dan Bretherton and Prof Keith Haines, from the Reading e-Science Centre and Prof Nigel Arnell, Director of the Walker Institute.

The research was enabled by the Reading Campus Grid, which greatly accelerated the computations involved, reducing the computing time from weeks to hours.

Full press release

Job opportunity at ReSC: Environmental e-Researcher

We need an imaginative and talented researcher to develop innovative computing techniques in support of cutting-edge research in climate science, Earth observation and other areas of environmental science.

You will be either an environmental scientist with a strong interest in computing or a computer scientist or software engineer with a strong interest in environmental science. You will need to be able to work individually and in small teams and to be able to communicate with colleagues from different disciplines.

Please see here for the full details of this opportunity.

ReSC at the UK e-Science All Hands Meeting

The Reading e-Science Centre was at the 2010 UK e-Science All Hands Meeting in Cardiff 14-16 September 2010 as part of e-Research South. Two of our projects - BlogMyData (in collaboration with the University of Southampton) and MashMyData (in collaboration with the Centre for Environmental Data Archival) were presented.

The MashMyData talk is available to be downloaded from the ReSC website [PPT Slides]

The BlogMyData talk can be viewed on slideshare, and videos showing a BlogMyData demo are also available [large - 500+MB], or [small - 25MB]

e-Research South Quarterly Newsletter, June 2010

The June 2010 issue of the e-Research South quarterly newsletter has been published.  It is themed on Energy and contains information about new projects in this field, as well as announcements of the two new ReSC-led data projects MashMyData and BlogMyData.

View the newsletter here, from where you can also subscribe to future editions.

Registration now open for UK e-Science All Hands Meeting 2010

The ninth UK e-Science All Hands Meeting (AHM 2010) will be held at the City Hall, Cardiff, from 13-16 September 2010.

The meeting provides a forum in which information on e-Science projects from all disciplines can be communicated and where the capabilities being developed within projects can be demonstrated.

AHM 2010 will begin on Monday 13th September with delegate registration.  The main conference programme will begin on Tuesday 14th September and end on Thursday 16th September. The conference will include presentations by groups from throughout the UK who are active in e-Science projects, as well as poster sessions, workshop sessions, project demonstrations and birds-of-a-feather sessions. 

The programme will also feature invited plenary  speakers, Professor Dan Atkins (University of Michigan, http://www.si.umich.edu/people/faculty-detail.htm?sid=2), Professor Alex Szalay (Johns Hopkins University, http://physics-astronomy.jhu.edu/people/faculty/szalay.html) and Professor Carole Goble (University of Manchester, http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~carole/).  We hope that this schedule of activities will provide a stimulating and engaging environment for all.

The registration page is now available at http://www.allhands.org.uk/registration.  We welcome delegates from all academic disciplines and industry who are currently engaged with e-Research or e-Science and those who have a growing interest in using e-Science to enhance their work.

For general enquiries about AHM 2010, please contact admin@allhands.org.uk.

Second Release Candidate of ncWMS 1.0 now available

We are pleased to announce the release of the second release candidate of version 1.0 of ncWMS, our Web Map Service implementation for NetCDF data, now available from http://ncwms.sf.net.

This version contains numerous bug fixes and improvements from previous versions, including:

• A refactored "core", which means that it is now much easier for ncWMS code to be reused in different settings, including THREDDS.
• Support for 360-day calendar systems (used in some climate simulations)
• An upgrade to version 4.1 of the NetCDF-Java libraries
• Improved handling of complex numerical grids

Click the image below to see ncWMS in action:

Comparing Quality Control of Argo Floats in the Global Ocean

With the benefit of acccess to some marine operational QC data via the work of Jim Cummings at FNMOC, we are seeking to understand
how the Argo delayed mode QC process compares with that of the operational centres. The former is a longer timescale and more
detailed process than the latter, but how different are the outcomes?

We have put the data in a PostgreSQL/PostGIS database and
connected this to a web portal using OpenLayers to view the results on a map. As yet the portal is not online pending some further
development, but a presentation on the work can be seen below

A prototype Database and Web Portal for Comparing Argo Delayed Mode QC with that of Operational Centres (A. Gemmell) from IODE OceanTeacher on Vimeo.