The Pangeo Ecosystem Supporting Climate Change Adaptation: The FAIR2Adapt RiOMar Case Study

The RiOMar (River dominated Ocean Margins) case study, part of the FAIR2Adapt (FAIR to Adapt to Climate Change) project (EU funded project grant agreement No 101188256), focuses on supporting science-based climate change adaptation strategies for coastal water quality and marine ecosystem management. The case study uses large environmental datasets, such as sea temperature, salinity, and other marine parameters, to assess and model the impacts of climate change on coastal ecosystems. As part of the FAIR2Adapt project, which aims to enhance the shareability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability of environmental data through the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) principles, the RiOMar case study emphasizes the use of cutting-edge data processing and analysis methods to support adaptive strategies for climate resilience.

In this presentation, we present our approach to reading the RiOMar large environmental datasets in netCDF format, creating VirtualZarr archives for efficient data handling, transforming them into a Discrete Global Grid System (DGGS) using the Healpix grid.Leveraging the Pangeo ecosystem, we use tools such as Kerchunk to create simpler access to multiple data sources, parallelize dataset processing using Dask or Cube, enabling scalable analysis of these complex, multi-dimensional data. We will show a comparison of performance between traditional cube-based approaches and Dask, highlighting the advantages of parallelized processing. Furthermore, we will showcase how to interactively visualize these datasets using tools like XDGGs and Lonboard, facilitating seamless exploration and analysis of the underlying environmental patterns. This work underscores the potential of open-source tools, scalable computing techniques, and the Pangeo ecosystem to enhance the accessibility and usability of large geospatial datasets in climate adaptation research.