FACE-IT: a science gateway for food security research

Understanding the potential impacts of climate change and the likely effectiveness of adaptation strategies is of crucial importance to the sustainability of both agriculture and natural ecosystems. Improvements in data availability and simulation model fidelity promises to enable significant improvements in knowledge. However, progress is hindered by the challenges inherent in creating and managing increasingly complex data acquisition, processing, simulation, post-processing, and intercomparison pipelines. To address these challenges, we are developing the Framework to Advance Climate, Economic, and Impact Investigations with Information Technology (FACE-IT) for crop and climate impact assessments. This integrated geospatial data processing, delivery, and simulation framework enables data ingest from diverse geospatial data archives; data regridding, aggregation, and other relevant processing required prior to simulation; large-scale climate impact simulation using a range of applications, including different agricultural models, and leveraging high-performance and cloud computing; and post-processing to produce aggregated yields and other output variables needed to enable model intercomparison and to connect biophysical model outputs to global and regional economic models and assessments. It leverages the capabilities of the Globus Galaxies platform to enable the capture of both workflows and simulation outputs in well-defined, reusable, and easily comparable forms. We describe FACE-IT and its application to studies within the Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project.