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There is a critical nationwide shortage of IT professionals as well as of scientists and engineers with high-performance computing (HPC) and big data related advanced computing skills. Simultaneously, the technology is growing in complexity and sophistication, which has led to the use of multi-disciplinary teams with members from a broad range of home domains everywhere in industry, government, and academia. Moreover, a lot of the vital team collaborations take will place virtually using a variety of software platforms now and in the future. We report here on experiences with preparing undergraduate and graduate students for these career opportunities in several contexts, from regular semester classes, an undergraduate summer research program, to an advanced graduate student CyberTraining program. All these programs are conducted fully online and leveraged concepts of flipped classrooms, recorded lectures, team-based and active learning, regular oral presentations, and more to ensure student engagement and lasting learning. 

Domain adaptation techniques using deep neural networks have been mainly used to solve the distribution shift problem in homogeneous domains where data usually share similar feature spaces and have the same dimensionalities. Nevertheless, real world applications often deal with heterogeneous domains that come from completely different feature spaces with different dimensionalities. In our remote sensing application, two remote sensing datasets collected by an active sensor and a passive one are heterogeneous. In particular, CALIOP actively measures each atmospheric column. In this study, 25 measured variables/features that are sensitive to cloud phase are used and they are fully labeled. VIIRS is an imaging radiometer, which collects radiometric measurements of the surface and atmosphere in the visible and infrared bands. Recent studies have shown that passive sensors may have difficulties in prediction cloud/aerosol types in complicated atmospheres (e.g., overlapping cloud and aerosol layers, cloud over snow/ice surface, etc.). To overcome the challenge of the cloud property retrieval in passive sensor, we develop a novel VAE based approach to learn domain invariant representation that capture the spatial pattern from multiple satellite remote sensing data (VDAM), to build a domain invariant cloud property retrieval method to accurately classify different cloud types (labels) in the passive sensing dataset. We further exploit the weight based alignment method on the label space to learn a powerful domain adaptation technique that is pertinent to the remote sensing application. Experiments demonstrate our method outperforms other state-of-the-art machine learning methods and achieves higher accuracy in cloud property retrieval in the passive satellite dataset. 

During 2018, 2019, and 2020, the UMBC CyberTraining initiative “Big Data + HPC + Atmospheric Sciences” created an online team-based training program for advanced graduate students and junior researchers that trained a total of 58 participants. The year 2020 included 6 undergraduate students. Based on this experience, the authors created the summer undergraduate research program Online Interdisciplinary Big Data Analytics in Science and Engineering that will conduct 8-week online team-based undergraduate research programs (bigdatareu.umbc.edu) in the summers 2021, 2022, and 2023. Given the context of many institutions potentially expanding their online instruction, we share our experiences how the successful lessons from CyberTraining transfer to a high-intensity full-time online summer undergraduate research program. 

MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) is a key instrument onboard NASA’s Terra (launched in 1999) and Aqua (launched in 2002) satellite missions as part of the more extensive Earth Observation System (EOS). By measuring the reflection and emission by the Earth-Atmosphere system in 36 spectral bands from the visible to thermal infrared with near-daily global coverage and high-spatial-resolution (250 m ~ 1 km at nadir), MODIS is playing a vital role in developing validated, global, interactive Earth system models. MODIS products are processed into three levels, i.e., Level-1 (L1), Level-2 (L2) and Level-3 (L3). To shift the current static and “one-size-fits-all” data provision method of MODIS products, in this paper, we propose a service-oriented flexible and efficient MODIS aggregation framework. Using this framework, users only need to get aggregated MODIS L3 data based on their unique requirements and the aggregation can run in parallel to achieve a speedup. The experiments show that our aggregation results are almost identical to the current MODIS L3 products and our parallel execution with 8 computing nodes can work 88.63 times faster than a serial code execution on a single node. 

The Arctic sea ice has retreated rapidly in the past few decades, which is believed to be driven by various dynamic and thermodynamic processes in the atmosphere. The newly open water resulted from sea ice decline in turn exerts large influence on the atmosphere. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the causality between multiple atmospheric processes and sea ice variations using three distinct data-driven causality approaches that have been proposed recently: Temporal Causality Discovery Framework Non-combinatorial Optimization via Trace Exponential and Augmented lagrangian for Structure learning (NOTEARS) and Directed Acyclic Graph-Graph Neural Networks (DAG-GNN). We apply these three algorithms to 39 years of historical time-series data sets, which include 11 atmospheric variables from ERA-5 reanalysis product and passive microwave satellite retrieved sea ice extent. By comparing the causality graph results of these approaches with what we summarized from the literature, it shows that the static graphs produced by NOTEARS and DAG-GNN are relatively reasonable. The results from NOTEARS indicate that relative humidity and precipitation dominate sea ice changes among all variables, while the results from DAG-GNN suggest that the horizontal and meridional wind are more important for driving sea ice variations. However, both approaches produce some unrealistic cause-effect relationships. Additionally, these three methods cannot well detect the delayed impact of one variable on another in the Arctic. It also turns out that the results are rather sensitive to the choice of hyperparameters of the three methods. As a pioneer study, this work paves the way to disentangle the complex causal relationships in the Earth system, by taking the advantage of cutting-edge Artificial Intelligence technologies.