# Purpose: Project description for 2005 UCI Calit2 Surf-IT program # (Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowships in Information Technologies) Distributed Data Reduction Techniques Applied to California Climate Change Simulations PI: Charlie Zender, Department of Earth System Science Description: Climate simulations prepared for the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reside on a distributed network of storage archives known as the Earth System Grid (ESG). This project will use new Distributed Data Reduction and Analysis (DDRA) techniques to characterize the envelop of future Californian climate contained within these datasets. Our goals are two-fold: 1. To quantify the Californian climate expected under a variety of IPCC forcing scenarios. 2. To benchmark, characterize, and reduce bottlenecks encountered in DDRA of geophysical datasets. Recent Californian climate assessments are based on data from incomplete ranges of climate scenarios, and on simulations from out-of-date models because the storage to hold all the relevent simulations from state-of-the-art models does not exist at any one facility. Hence the DDRA techniques being developed as part of our NCO/SCO project will improve our understanding California's climate pathways. These DDRA techniques have never been applied to terascale ESG data. During this novel application, we will identify, characterize, and try to reduce DDRA bottlenecks encountered. We seek an upper division undergraduate to use the computer resources of the Earth System Modeling Facility (ESMF) to perform this research. The student will gain skills and understanding of high-performance computing, data analysis, and climate change. The student will work in a UNIX/Linux research environment and should have prior experience with data analysis, and environmental science. Further information about this project is available at http://nco.sf.net#prp_sei