# Purpose: Project description for 2005 UCI Calit2 Surf-IT program 
# (Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowships in Information Technologies)

Distributed Data Reduction Techniques Applied to 
    California Climate Change Simulations

PI: Charlie Zender, Department of Earth System Science

Description:
Climate simulations prepared for the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) of
the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reside on a
distributed network of storage archives known as the Earth System Grid
(ESG).  This project will use new Distributed Data Reduction and
Analysis (DDRA) techniques to characterize the envelop of future
Californian climate contained within these datasets. Our goals are
two-fold: 1. To quantify the Californian climate expected under a
variety of IPCC forcing scenarios. 2. To benchmark, characterize, and
reduce bottlenecks encountered in DDRA of geophysical datasets.

Recent Californian climate assessments are based on data from
incomplete ranges of climate scenarios, and on simulations from
out-of-date models because the storage to hold all the relevent
simulations from state-of-the-art models does not exist at any one
facility. Hence the DDRA techniques being developed as part of our
NCO/SCO project will improve our understanding California's climate
pathways. These DDRA techniques have never been applied to terascale
ESG data. During this novel application, we will identify,
characterize, and try to reduce DDRA bottlenecks encountered.

We seek an upper division undergraduate to use the computer resources
of the Earth System Modeling Facility (ESMF) to perform this research.
The student will gain skills and understanding of high-performance
computing, data analysis, and climate change.   
The student will work in a UNIX/Linux research environment and should
have prior experience with data analysis, and environmental science.
Further information about this project is available at
http://nco.sf.net#prp_sei