Unidata Science Gateway: A research infrastructure to advance research and education in the Earth System Sciences

Unidata has developed and deployed data infrastructure and data-proximate scientific workflows and software tools using cloud computing technologies for accessing, analyzing, and visualizing geoscience data. These resources are provided to educators and researchers through the Unidata Science Gateway (https://science-gateway.unidata.ucar.edu) and deployed on the U. S. National Science Foundation funded Jetstream/Jetstream2 cloud computing facility. During the SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19 pandemic, the Unidata Science Gateway has been used by many universities to teach data-centric atmospheric science courses and conduct several software training workshops to advance skills in data science.

The COVID-19 pandemic led to the closure of university campuses with little advance notice. Educators at institutions of higher learning had to urgently transition from in-person teaching to online classrooms. While such a sudden change was disruptive for education, it also presented an opportunity to experiment with instructional technologies that have been emerging for the last few years. Web-based computational notebooks, with their mixture of explanatory text, equations, diagrams and interactive code are an effective tool for online learning. Their use is prevalent in many disciplines including the geosciences. Multi-user computational notebook servers (e.g., Jupyter Notebooks) enable specialists to deploy pre-configured scientific computing environments for the benefit of learners and researchers. The use of such tools and environments removes barriers for learners who otherwise have to download and install complex software tools that can be time consuming to configure, simplifying workflows and reducing time to analysis and results. It also provides a consistent computing environment for everyone, lowering the barrier to access to data and tools. These servers can be provisioned with computational resources not found in a desktop computing setting and leverage cloud computing environments and high-speed networks..

The Unidata Science Gateway hosts more than a Terabyte of real-time weather data each day from nearly 30 different data streams. In addition, many analysis and visualization tools are made available via the Science Gateway and they are linked to the aforementioned real-time data.

Since spring 2020, when the Covid pandemic led to the closure of universities across the world, Unidata has assisted many earth science departments with computational notebook environments for their classes and labs. As of now, we have worked with educators at more than 18 universities to tailor these resources for their teaching and learning objectives. We ensured the technology was correctly provisioned with appropriate computational resources and collaborated to have teaching material immediately available for students. There were many successful examples of online learning experiences.

In this presentation, we describe the details of the Unidata Science Gateway resources and discuss how those resources enabled Unidata to support universities during the COVID-19 lockdown. We will also discuss how Unidata is re-imagining the role of its Science Gateway as a community hub, where university faculty are not only users of the gateway services but also content creators as well as contributors to it and share their products and resources.