OpenGHG: A community platform for greenhouse gas data science

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With numerous governments, cities, and organisations declaring climate emergencies and net-zero emissions targets, greenhouse gases (GHGs) are now the focus of international geopolitics and UK domestic policies. Furthermore, with the recent identification of violations of the Montreal Protocol, ozone depleting substances (ODS), are receiving renewed attention. It is therefore critically important to be able to analyse GHG and ODS emissions trends, examine spatial patterns, estimate future trajectories, and explore mitigation options in an open, transparent and publicly accessible way. Our proposed project will enable this, using state-of-the-art computing technology to create a platform, "OpenGHG".The estimation of GHG and ODS emissions requires close collaboration between a diverse group of scientists and stakeholders: "bottom-up" methods rely on statistical information collected by governments and industries, combined with scientific studies of the emissions intensity of particular activities, or the development of computer models that describe how human or natural processes produce or absorb GHGs. Complementary "top-down" techniques rely on instruments developed by spectroscopists and analytical chemists, the data from which are analysed along with outputs from meteorological models using advanced statistical methods. The data that is being generated by these diverse research and stakeholder communities is growing rapidly. However, the development of computational tools to help researchers aggregate data from such a wide range of sources and carry out and share analyses has not kept pace. Furthermore, given the sensitive nature of, for example, the inference of national GHG or ODS emissions, these communities must urgently take steps to make their analyses more transparent and reproducible.OpenGHG meets these needs, by providing an open, cloud-based, platform for researchers to share data and analysis methods and publish workflows. Furthermore, we have co-designed with our stakeholders, a range of tools that will facilitate the sharing of research outputs with governments, private companies and the public. The OpenGHG platform will:- Continuously incorporate and standardise up to date GHG and ODS measurements, bottom-up emission estimates, and a range of ancillary information related to GHG and ODS emissions. This data will be pulled automatically, or on demand, from a range of public archives, or pushed to the platform by data providers seeking to analyse or share their own data - Provide a wide range of analysis options, including the ability to design, publish and share custom workflows- Allow production of new top-down and bottom-up emissions estimates by accessing pre-existing and newly developed models and methods incorporated into the platform- Provide users with lower levels of computational expertise an easy-to-use interface for the most useful data analysis and visualisation. This will include comparisons of top-down and bottom-up estimates of emissions from different sectors of the economy, and potential future warming from different emissions scenarios.