EarthCube IA: Collaborative Proposal: Integrated GeoScience Observatory

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The habitability of planet Earth depends on a complex interaction between interior regions, solid surface, oceans, atmosphere, near-earth space environment, and Sun. Yet, study of this Sun-Earth system is traditionally broken up into separate geoscience disciplines, so that progress can be made by scientists working in reasonably-sized communities that share a common language and base of knowledge. To broach the bigger question of the interaction of the subsystems studied by the separate communities, it is necessary to overcome the barriers of communication posed by different observational instruments, software tools for interpreting data, and modeling methods. In answer to this challenge, the Integrated Geoscience Observatory is a pilot project that creates an online platform for integrating data and associated software tools contributed by separate geoscience research communities, into a unified toolset that brings them together. The vision is to expand the individual domains of geoscience research toward study of the whole Sun-Earth system, and in so doing to uncover the system level effects critical to the habitability of planet Earth.EarthCube aims to develop a framework for assisting researchers in understanding the Earth system. This systems science challenge is recognized in the Decadal Survey in Solar and Space Physics [2012], with the conclusion "Data from diverse space- and ground-based instruments need to be routinely combined in order to maximize their multi-scale potential." The Integrated Geoscience Observatory is a pilot project that explores realization of this vision by focusing on the limited context of geospace research. The observatory creates an integrated package of software tools contributed by researchers with specific capabilities, and designed to enable integration of diverse observational data. Features of the toolkit include: (A) linking diverse data sets from multiple data repositories and automatically mapping them to a common user-specified coordinate grid; (B) implementing the well-known Assimilative Mapping of Ionospheric Electrodynamics (AMIE) procedure for assimilation of this data to yield a global picture; and (C) utilization of the EarthCube building blocks GeoSoft, for communicating ontology, and GeoDataspace, for attributing credit to contributors through publication of processed data. The toolset can be accessed and used either through a web-based computing environment, or through download packages for local installation, with a nearly seamless transition between the two.