OpenGHG: A community platform for greenhouse gas data science

随着许多政府、城市和组织宣布气候紧急状态和净零排放目标，温室气体（GHG）现在成为国际地缘政治和英国国内政策的焦点。此外，随着最近查明违反《蒙特利尔议定书》的行为，消耗臭氧层物质重新受到关注。因此，能够以公开、透明和公众可获得的方式分析温室气体和消耗臭氧层物质排放趋势、研究空间格局、估计未来轨迹并探讨减缓备选办法至关重要。我们提议的项目将利用最先进的计算技术创建一个平台“OpenGHG”，以实现这一目标。温室气体和消耗臭氧层物质排放量的估算需要不同科学家和利益攸关方之间的密切合作：“自下而上”的方法依靠政府和工业收集的统计资料，加上对特定活动排放强度的科学研究，或开发计算机模型，描述人类或自然过程如何产生或吸收温室气体。补充性的“自上而下”技术依赖于光谱学家和分析化学家开发的仪器，这些仪器的数据沿着使用先进统计方法的气象模型的输出进行分析。这些不同的研究和利益相关者社区产生的数据正在迅速增长。然而，帮助研究人员从如此广泛的来源汇总数据并进行和分享分析的计算工具的发展并没有跟上步伐。此外，由于国家温室气体或消耗臭氧层物质排放量的推断等敏感性，这些社区必须立即采取措施，使其分析更加透明和可重复。OpenGHG通过为研究人员提供一个开放的、基于云的平台来共享数据和分析方法，并发布工作流程，从而满足了这些需求。此外，我们还与利益相关者共同设计了一系列工具，以促进与政府、私营公司和公众分享研究成果。OpenGHG平台将：-不断纳入和汇编最新的温室气体和消耗臭氧层物质测量、自下而上的排放估算以及一系列与温室气体和消耗臭氧层物质排放相关的辅助信息。这些数据将自动或按需从一系列公共档案中提取，或由寻求分析或共享自己数据的数据提供商推送到平台-提供广泛的分析选项，包括设计，发布和共享自定义工作流程-允许通过访问预处理数据，现有的和新开发的模型和方法整合到平台中-为计算专业知识水平较低的用户提供易于使用的界面，以进行最有用的数据分析和可视化。这将包括比较不同经济部门自上而下和自下而上的排放估计数，以及不同排放情景下未来可能出现的变暖。

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.