POSE: Phase I: Toward an Open-Source Ecosystem for Multiscale Analysis of Earth and Planetary Systems

This Pathways to Enable Open-Source Ecosystems (POSE) project advances the ability to understand and predict global-scale geophysical, planetary, and solar phenomena, including ocean and atmospheric circulation. The project develops the FlowSieve codebase into an easily accessible open-source software ecosystem for probing fluid flows across scales on Earth and other planets, from local weather events to global circulation patterns. By providing these advanced computational tools in a publicly shared framework, this project transforms research in earth and planetary science, solar physics, and related areas. Improved understanding and prediction of these phenomena is essential for economic growth and public safety, including navigation and shipping, energy and resource management, and disaster resilience. Through community-driven development and maintenance, the project improves scientific and technological progress and promotes broad access to cutting-edge computational methods. The resource spurs discoveries benefiting researchers, educators, and policy makers.

FlowSieve is a unique open-source codebase that implements a novel coarse-graining methodology for generating geographic maps of dynamical processes at different spatio-temporal scales in spherical domains, including oceanic and atmospheric flows within the earth system and flows on other planets. The codebase has been used for the analysis of data from global and regional models, and data from satellites and spacecrafts. This project helps to transform FlowSieve into an Open-Source Ecosystem (OSE). The OSE's main mission is to catalyze research in geoscience, planetary science, and beyond, by maintaining and evolving the platform to meet the needs of researchers in a decentralized manner following an open, asynchronous, and distributed development model. This POSE project pursues a multi-pronged effort to encourage and guide future users and developers within the broad geo- and planetary science communities. This guidance includes organizing tutorial sessions at major conferences, hosting a hackathon, assembling a comprehensive user manual, creating online tutorials, expanding test cases, and implementing automated testing. Another major goal of this POSE project is to draft a strategy and organizational structure toward transforming FlowSieve into a self-sustaining OSE with the aid of an external advisory committee.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

Award Number: 2449340
Principal Investigator: Hussein Aluie
Funds Obligated: $320,000
State: NY