PSL Ocean Visualization and Analysis Portals

Cathy Smith and Chia-Wei Hsu

NOAA Physical Sciences Laboratory and CIRES

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Tuesday, Dec. 6, 2022, 2:00 pm MT

Abstracts

Gridded website search and Web-Based Reanalysis Intercomparison Tools for the ocean (Smith)

PSL has a set of useful web tools for displaying and analyzing ocean related variables and datasets. I will show two of these. The first is a newly developed portal to PSL’s gridded datasets that finds, plots, and extracts subsets. The second is a set of web-based reanalysis intercomparison tools that allow users to plot, analyze, and compare monthly ocean reanalyses and/or observational data. Tools include a mapping tool that plots maps and vertical cross-sections, a tool that plots correlations of index time series (e.g. PDO) with gridded data, a tool that plots and analyzes and compares time series from gridded datasets or from a set of supplied time-series including wavelets, distributions, and heatmaps, and a tool that plots ocean profiles. We have 7 ocean recent reanalyses and will be adding more.

Speaker Bio: Cathy Smith received her undergraduate degree from MIT in atmospheric science and her masters degree from the University of Washington where she studied statistical techniques for understanding climate relationships. At NOAA/CDC (a predecessor organization of PSL) she worked at ENSO on climate relationships in the US and western US rainfall. She he was part of a subgroup at CDC that ported command line climate analysis tools and plotting tools to the web for use by CDC researchers and the public. Currently she creates and maintains webpages and datasets at NOAA/PSL.

Marine Heatwave Portal (Hsu)

Marine heatwaves are periods of persistent anomalously warm ocean temperatures, which can have significant impacts on marine life as well as coastal communities and economies. Scientists at PSL are working to characterize marine heatwaves, understand how they form and dissipate, and predict them in advance. Here, we develop a marine heatwave portal hosted on PSL website for an experimental guidance aiming to provide insight from the latest research advances in PSL. The portal has three main interactive functionalities including global monthly marine heatwave forecast up to one year in advance, historical and current global marine heatwaves based on observational data, and visualization of high resolution regional ocean conditions which enable a more advanced scientific discovery. The advantage of the portal is providing a friendly user interface to quickly get the marine heatwave information and high resolution ocean conditions focusing on various large marine ecosystems. We hope this portal can provide guidance for better coastal management and adaptation.

Speaker Bio: Chia-Wei Hsu is an associate scientist at the NOAA Physical Sciences Laboratory. Chia-Wei previously worked on climate model validation for his two post-doctoral projects. One focuses on the tropical sea level variation bias in the current ocean general circulation model (GCM), a collaboration between the University of Arizona and the NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory. One focuses on the ocean surface flux bias at intraseasonal time scale in the coupled GCM, a collaboration between the Colorado State University and the University of Reading. His interest is to create useful analysis tools by taking advantage of the open sources software to better understand climate-related issues. He is working with Cathy Smith and Mike Alexander on data management and developing a visualization/data portal under the Climate and Fisheries Initiative.

Seminar Contact: psl.seminars@noaa.gov