Abstract The National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) is a multidecadal and continental-scale observatory with sites across the United States. Having entered its operational phase in 2018, NEON data products, software, and services become available to facilitate research on the impacts of climate change, land-use change, and invasive species. An essential component of NEON are its 47 tower sites, where eddy-covariance (EC) sensors are operated to determine the surface–atmosphere exchange of momentum, heat, water, and CO 2 . EC tower networks such as AmeriFlux, the Integrated Carbon Observation System (ICOS), and NEON are vital for providing the distributed observations to address interactions at the soil–vegetation–atmosphere interface. NEON represents the largest single-provider EC network globally, with standardized observations and data processing explicitly designed for intersite comparability and analysis of feedbacks across multiple spatial and temporal scales. Furthermore, EC is tightly integrated with soil, meteorology, atmospheric chemistry, isotope, phenology, and rich contextual observations such as airborne remote sensing and in situ sampling bouts. Here, we present an overview of NEON’s observational design, field operation, and data processing that yield community resources for the study of surface–atmosphere interactions. Near-real-time data products become available from the NEON Data Portal, and EC and meteorological data are ingested into AmeriFlux and FLUXNET globally harmonized data releases. Open-source software for reproducible, extensible, and portable data analysis includes the eddy4R family of R packages underlying the EC data product generation. These resources strive to integrate with existing infrastructures and networks, to suggest novel systemic solutions, and to synergize ongoing research efforts across science communities.
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Automated Integration of Continental-scale Observations in Near-Real Time for Simulation and Analysis of Biosphere–Atmosphere Interaction
The National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) is a continental-scale observatory with sites across the US collecting standardized ecological observations that will operate for multiple decades. To maximize the utility of NEON data, we envision edge computing systems that gather, calibrate, aggregate, and ingest measurements in an integrated fashion. Edge systems will employ machine learning methods to cross-calibrate, gap-fill and provision data in near-real time to the NEON Data Portal and to High Performance Computing (HPC) systems, running ensembles of Earth system models (ESMs) that assimilate the data. For the first time gridded EC data products and response functions promise to offset pervasive observational biases through evaluating, benchmarking, optimizing parameters, and training new ma- chine learning parameterizations within ESMs all at the same model-grid scale. Leveraging open-source software for EC data analysis, we are al- ready building software infrastructure for integration of near-real time data streams into the International Land Model Benchmarking (ILAMB) package for use by the wider research community. We will present a perspective on the design and integration of end-to-end infrastructure for data acquisition, edge computing, HPC simulation, analysis, and validation, where Artificial Intelligence (AI) approaches are used throughout the distributed workflow to improve accuracy and computational performance.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1822420
- PAR ID:
- 10280920
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Driving Scientific and Engineering Discoveries Through the Convergence of HPC, Big Data and AI. SMC 2020. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1315
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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