Cyberinfrastructure for Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets

Science and engineering research and education are foundational drivers of Cyberinfrastructure. Understanding the relationship between sea level rise and melting ice sheets is the application domain of this project. It is an issue of global impor- tance, especially for the populations living in coastal regions. Scientists are in need of computationally intensive tools and models that will help them measure and predict the response of ice sheets to climate change. To address the Cyberinfrastructure chal- lenges presented immediately by the Center for Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets (CReSIS) and the polar science community in gen- eral, the Cyberinfrastructure Center for Polar Science (CICPS), with experts in Polar Science, Remote Sensing and Cyberinfra- structure, has been established. This center includes the University of Kansas (KU), the lead CReSIS institution; Indiana University (IU), which is internationally known for its broad expertise in research and infrastructure for eScience; and Elizabeth City State Uni- versity (ECSU), a founding member of CReSIS with a center of excellence in remote sensing. CICPS includes CReSIS institutions as collaborators and will drive PolarGrid to meet their goals while using the best-known technologies. ,Founded with the vision that Cyberinfrastructure will have a profound impact on polar science, CICPS is committed to the effort needed to build the portal, work- flow and Grid (Web) services that are required to make PolarGrid real. This paper describes the set of CICPS projects that are being implemented and proposed. The first of these projects is an NSF CI-TEAM project (PI: Hayden, Co-PIs: Fox and Gogineni), "Cyberinfrastructure for Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets," which establishs a virtual classroom environment and a CReSIS Science Gateway for TeraGrid working with IU, Minority-Serving Institution Cyberinfrastructure Empowerment Coalition (MSI-CIEC), and TeraGrid. The second project, called PolarGrid (PI: Fox, Co-PIs: Hayden and Gogineni), as proposed, deploys the Cyberinfrastruc- ture which provides the polar community with a state-of-the-art computing facility to process the large volumes of data to be col- lected by CReSIS field operations and support large-scale ice-sheet models. PolarGrid will follow modern open data access stan- dards so that raw, processed and simulated data can be archived outside PolarGrid by and for the full science community.