Coupling of Earth science models and earth observations through OGC interoperability specifications

Modeling, a common method in Earth science research, needs a significant amount of data for model initialization, validation, verification, and calibration. Most of those data requirements could be met by the Earth observation data and their derived products. However, currently the use of Earth observation data in modeling requires significant effort for data preparation. This paper presents a Web service based general framework for making Earth observation data easily accessible and usable by various Earth science models. The framework uses OGC and ISO geospatial standards and specifications for facilitating the interoperability between Earth observation data sources and Earth science models (ESMs), and geospatial processing modeling, web service workflow and product virtualizations for automatically producing model-specific data products. The framework has been implemented as CyberConnector, a building block of NSF EarthCube cyberinfrastructure. Case demonstration of CyberConnector with three representative ESMs shows the reduction of at least one order of magnitude in time and effort spent by modelers for data preparation.