Implementation and management of an Environmental Data System for climatological research

The implementation of an Environmental Data System (EDS) for the Share Geonetwork web-platform dedicated to the management and sharing of climatological data acquired from sensors, stations and from physical or chemical analysis from single researcher or scientific institution is the main issue of this PhD research activities. Purpose of this research is: 1. the implementation of the EDS for a webGIS service platform dedicated to the management and sharing of climatological data acquired by high elevation stations (SHARE GeoNetwork project, promoted by the Ev-K2 CNR Committee) and data derived from chemical and physics characterization about non-polar ice cores and marine sediment core ("Project of Strategic Interest - PNR 2011-2013 NextData."). 2. the development of an automatic system useful to validate MODIS product over Hymalaya using Ev-K2 CNR Committee high-altitude data (presentation of a case study). 1. The web-platform will provide basically three types of services: (a) structured metadata archive, data and results from high-altitude and marine environments researches and projects; (b) access to meteo-climatic and atmospheric composition data, past climate in- formation from ice and sediment cores, biodiversity and ecosystem data, mea- surements of the hydrological cycle, marine re-analyses and climate projec- tions at global and regional scale; (c) dedicated webGIS for georeferenced data collected during the research. 2. In particular the elaboration process is performed by the use of Python script on the MODIS/Terra Snow Cover Daily L3 Global 500m Grid (MOD10A1) data and metadata (snow cover, snow albedo, fractional snow cover, and Quality Assessment (QA) data in compressed HDF-EOS format) and radiative data (Short (SWR) and Long (LWR)Wave Radiation) from Nepal Climate Observatory-Pyramid (NCO-P) . Methods 1. High elevation environmental and territorial data and metadata are cataloged in a single integrated platform to get access to the information heritage of the SHARE project, using open source tools: Geonetwork for the metadata catalog and webGIS resources, and the open source Weather and Water Database (WDB), developed by the Norwegian Meteorological Institute, for the database information system implementation. A specific database, named WDBPALEO, formed by IDB (Ice Core Database) and SDB (Sea-Core Database), has been developed for the collec- tion of paleoclimatological data from ice cores extracted from glaciers in non-polar ice cores and marine sediment cores. The storage structure of the data is based on the architecture of WDB. In the first phase of the project, the database WDB has been modified to input data from high altitudes meteorological stations in Nepal, Pakistan, Africa and Italy. Moreover, the need to have a tested database able to contain data of different nature has led to the modification of the program source to store data of different nature and with unlimited temporal extension such as ice and sediment cores. 2. For data elaboration and comparison a temporal scale of two months has been used. NCO-P records SWR and LWR (both upwelling and downwelling, useful to calculate daily short wave albedo) since 2003. Corresponding time interval of MOD10A1 data have been downloaded from http://reverb.echo.nasa.gov/ reverb. From Pyramid data Short-Wave albedo has been calculated for each day of the pre-monson period (April and May) and compared with the mean value of 4 neighborhood snow albedo pixels where the Pyramid station is located. Results and Conclusions 1. The tool that is being studied and developed proposes an environment for the research, dedicated mainly to high-altitude studies, allowing researchers to access the wealth of resources that are acquired by the climatological stations. With regards to remote sensing data processing, the system gives the opportunity to free access to the data relevant either for atmospheric corrections or ground data calibrations. Moreover, into SHARE GeoNetwork, a specific topic is dedicated to the description of the new technologies developed in the SHARE Project. The core of the system is the catalog of metadata based on GeoNetwork open source appli- cation, proposed on the principles of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) and International and Open Standards for services and protocols (from ISO/TC211 and OGC). A new hierarchical structure has been implemented into SHARE for the description of metatada of the stations, sensors and measures. Also , fol- lowing the scope of the NEXTDATA project a methodology to recover, store, access and disseminate data derived from chemical and physics characterization about non-polar ice cores and marine sediment core has been developed. They give precious information about the evolution of anthropogenic pollution, climate variability and about the composition of middle troposphere. With an accurate bibliography research we managed to collect a great amount of ice core and sed- iment core data and metadata that were essential to study a suitable methodol- ogy to reach this goal. Data collected in the spatial geographic database were integrated in an information system through specific web services. The first re- lease of SHARE Geonetwork is working from 2011 and it is accessible for public at http://geonetwork.evk2cnr.org. Second release, recently published is ac- cessible at: http://geonetwork.evk2cnr.org/index.php, with data navigation, visualization and dowload. 2. The Python code, with Modis reprojection tool, collected and modifed should be useful to manage and elaborate a large amount of data, giving a clear methodology for the validation of MODIS data and products, in particular using Open Source tools. A moderate correlation exists (0.50) between the calculated albedo and the MOD10A1 albedo product. In order to improve the results of this study the data were subdivided into three groups on the base of the acquisition date. The correlation between these new groups of data appear increased, guessing the solar zenith angle in uences in the MODIS snow albedo retrieval. It will be necessary further statistical evidences to confirm this correlation.