Harnessing cyber-infrastructure for local scale climate change research in Africa

Abstract

Climate change poses a major threat to environmental sustainability. Africa in particular, is vulnerable with projected worsening food security, increased threats to public health, increased stress on surface water resources and a general increase in extreme weather events. Political commitment regarding the development of effective mitigation and adaptation strategies needs to be complemented by a more comprehensive understanding of the effects of climate change. However, comparatively little is known about the projected effects of climate change for Africa at the local scale. We present data sets of climate-change projections downscaled to a resolution of 0.5° over the African continent, and data sets downscaled further to an 8 km grid size for areas covering selected urban centres in Africa. These data sets constitute a novel and unique resource for research. We describe a set of web services that provide access to aggregations of selected key climate-change variables derived from these data sets. Furthermore, we propose to incorporate these resources in a scientific workflows platform, EO4VisTrails. EO4VisTrails augments the functionality of existing scientific workflow systems by utilizing distributed computing resources and providing interfaces, services and analytical tools for working with geospatio-temporal data. EO4Vistrails enables an accelerated pace of research by facilitating rapid experimentation, provenance management and parameter exploration.