The Apache Software Foundation Announces Apache™ Open Climate Workbench™ as a Top-Level Project

FOREST HILL, Md., March 3, 2014 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of more than 170 Open Source projects and initiatives, announced today that the Apache Open Climate Workbench Project (a.k.a. "Apache Climate" or "Apache OCW") has graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a Top-Level Project (TLP), signifying that the project's community and products have been well-governed under the ASF's meritocratic process and principles.

Apache Climate is a climate evaluation toolkit used to leverage model outputs from organizations such as the Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF), the Coordinated Regional Downscaling Experiment (CORDEX), the U.S. National Climate Assessment (NCA), and the North American Regional Climate Change Assessment Program (NARCCAP), coupled with remote sensing data from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and other agencies.

"Collaboration and science go hand in hand so it's great to see NASA, CORDEX, NARCCAP, universities from around the world, and the greater climate science community embracing Open Source and the ASF," said Michael Joyce, Vice President of Apache Climate. "The Open Climate Workbench has had an amazing journey with a great team of contributors and I'm excited to see where it's going."

Originally seeded from the Regional Climate Model Evaluation System (RCMES) code from the Joint Institute for Regional Earth System Science and Engineering (JIFRESSE) scientific collaboration between University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) and the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the Apache Climate toolkit includes capabilities for data rebinning, metrics computation, and visualization. RCMES now relies extensively on Apache Climate; those members of the global climate community who have been using RCMES prior to its submission to the Apache Incubator in February 2013 have advanced to using RCMES powered by Apache Open Climate Workbench.

Apache Climate features prominently in research applications, with the system used to analyze recent developments in United States and Africa, as well as examine the uncertainty in observed precipitation datasets over the India-Tibet region.

"The Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology are the main the regional climate institution in India related with climate change and impact assessments for India and surrounding regions," explained Jinwon Kim, regional climate modeling lead scientist at JIFRESSE and researcher at the UCLA Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences.

"I am using components of Apache OCW in my research to build an application that can identify weather-scaled phenomenon in long-term high resolution satellite (and eventually climate model) datasets," said Kim Whitehall, PhD student in the Howard University Program in Atmospheric Sciences (HUPAS).

Apache Climate is the result of an estimated 24 years of effort (as calculated by the COCOMO – Constructive Cost Model), with nearly 850 commits by 15 individual contributors (representing 94,843 lines of code) during its first year at The Apache Software Foundation.

To manage the massive datasets associated with the metrics, visualizations, and algorithms that support RCMES, Apache Climate is often paired with Apache OODT™ (Object Oriented Data Technology), the Open Source data management system framework originally developed at NASA for information integration and for science data processing and retrieval.

"Leveraging Apache OODT, which was reused on SNPP (Suomi National Polar-Orbiting Partnership) and JPSS (Joint Polar Satellite System) satellite missions, and the Apache open source governance, the OCW is the next step in the development of an integrated climate community research and development environment," explained Dr. Tsengdar Lee, Scientific Computing Portfolio Manager and Weather Data Analysis Program Scientist at the NASA Science Mission Directorate. "It will be developed by the community for the community in a completely open way."

"The community is always looking for good tools to analysis massive amounts of distributed data. It looks like Apache Climate can help in that effort," said Dean Williams, Analytics and Informatics Management Systems project leader at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and Principal Investigator of the Earth System Grid Federation.

A demonstration of RCMES powered by Apache Climate is available at http://rcmes.jpl.nasa.gov/training/videos

Availability and Oversight 
As with all Apache products, Apache Open Climate Workbench software is released under the Apache License v2.0, and is overseen by a self-selected team of active contributors to the project. A Project Management Committee (PMC) guides the Project's day-to-day operations, including community development and product releases. For documentation and ways to become involved with Apache Climate, visit http://climate.apache.org/

About The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) 
Established in 1999, the all-volunteer Foundation oversees more than one hundred and seventy leading Open Source projects, including Apache HTTP Server --the world's most popular Web server software. Through the ASF's meritocratic process known as "The Apache Way," more than 400 individual Members and 3,500 Committers successfully collaborate to develop freely available enterprise-grade software, benefiting millions of users worldwide: thousands of software solutions are distributed under the Apache License; and the community actively participates in ASF mailing lists, mentoring initiatives, and ApacheCon, the Foundation's official user conference, trainings, and expo. The ASF is a US 501(c)(3) charitable organization, funded by individual donations and corporate sponsors including Budget Direct, Citrix, Cloudera, Comcast, Facebook, Google, Hortonworks, HP, Huawei, IBM, InMotion Hosting, Matt Mullenweg, Microsoft, Pivotal, Produban, WANdisco, and Yahoo. For more information, visit http://www.apache.org/ or follow @TheASF on Twitter.

"Apache", "Apache Open Climate Workbench", "Apache Climate", "Apache OCW", "OCW", "Apache OODT", "OODT", and "ApacheCon" are trademarks of The Apache Software Foundation. All other brands and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

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SOURCE The Apache Software Foundation