Data Mining Geophysical Content from Satellites and Global Climate Models

Abstract

We present an example of a simulated global climate model that is intended to stream real-time NASA data into the geophysical and climate science and assessment community over the next 5-10 years. It is known that the 3-D atmospheric wave structures and transport physics interact with spatially and time varying surface sources and sinks of CO2, and that this communication between surface and atmosphere results in an exceedingly complicated evolution of atmospheric CO2 in time and space. Data mining techniques may be applied to the further development this 4-D model by incorporating satellite-generated data sets for hundreds of geophysical climate variables into existing simulation structures. These data sets are of order 100’s of Terabytes. Data mining will allow the determination of the fluxes of atmospheric CO2. Data mining and knowledge acquisition contribute to the accurate determination of the sources and sinks of atmospheric CO2, facilitating among other scientific discoveries, global treaty verification.