Vision of Cyberinfrastructure for End-to-End Environmental Explorations (C4E4)

Abstract

Holistic approaches are needed for understanding and addressing a wide range of environmental issues that require multidisciplinary studies of complex and interlocking systems. The writers’ vision of a cyberinfrastructure for end-to-end environmental exploration (C4E4) that combines data and modeling tools in an integrated environment across different spatial and temporal scales is presented. The overall goal behind C4E4 is to enable a broad environmental research and remediation community to address the challenges of environmental data management and integration in real-world settings. The St. Joseph Watershed in northern Indiana is chosen as a test bed in this effort. The C4E4 framework will allow researchers to combine heterogeneous data resources with state-of-the-art modeling and visualization tools through a user-friendly web portal. By engaging TeraGrid resources, C4E4 will have the computational resources to store, manipulate, and query large data sets, thereby facilitating new science. C4E4 will serve as a prototype, and provide valuable experience for scaling up to larger observatories at the national level. This paper presents the writers’ vision and goals, initial efforts, and briefly describes how C4E4 can benefit the environmental community.