A JavaScript API for the Ice Sheet System Model (ISSM) 4.11: towards an online interactive model for the cryosphere community

Earth system models (ESMs) are becoming increasingly complex, requiring extensive knowledge and experience to deploy and use in an efficient manner. They run on high-performance architectures that are significantly different from the everyday environments that scientists use to pre- and post-process...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Geoscientific Model Development 2017-12, Vol.10 (12), p.4393-4403
Main Authors: Larour, Eric, Cheng, Daniel, Perez, Gilberto, Quinn, Justin, Morlighem, Mathieu, Duong, Bao, Nguyen, Lan, Petrie, Kit, Harounian, Silva, Halkides, Daria, Hayes, Wayne
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Analysis
API (Computer programming)
Application programming interface
Communities
Complexity
Cryosphere
Datasets
Earth
General circulation models
Glaciation
Ice sheets
Interactive systems
Internet
Java
Laboratories
Mathematical models
Matlab
Physics
Properties
Scientists
Servers
Simulation
Software
Websites
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Summary:Earth system models (ESMs) are becoming increasingly complex, requiring extensive knowledge and experience to deploy and use in an efficient manner. They run on high-performance architectures that are significantly different from the everyday environments that scientists use to pre- and post-process results (i.e., MATLAB, Python). This results in models that are hard to use for non-specialists and are increasingly specific in their application. It also makes them relatively inaccessible to the wider science community, not to mention to the general public. Here, we present a new software/model paradigm that attempts to bridge the gap between the science community and the complexity of ESMs by developing a new JavaScript application program interface (API) for the Ice Sheet System Model (ISSM). The aforementioned API allows cryosphere scientists to run ISSM on the client side of a web page within the JavaScript environment. When combined with a web server running ISSM (using a Python API), it enables the serving of ISSM computations in an easy and straightforward way. The deep integration and similarities between all the APIs in ISSM (MATLAB, Python, and now JavaScript) significantly shortens and simplifies the turnaround of state-of-the-art science runs and their use by the larger community. We demonstrate our approach via a new Virtual Earth System Laboratory (VESL) website (http://vesl.jpl.nasa.gov, VESL(2017)).
ISSN:1991-9603
1991-959X
1991-962X
1991-9603
1991-962X
DOI:10.5194/gmd-10-4393-2017