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Open Access Publications from the University of California

Scholarly Works (5 results)

  • Article
  • Peer Reviewed
UC Santa Barbara Previously Published Works (1981)
Radiometric measurements from satellites in the solar portion of the electromagnetic spectrum can be converted to measurements of surface exitance. Over rugged terrain, the satellite image must be precisely registered to a terrain data set. For small areas a first-order polynomial interpolation scheme is generally satisfactory for the geometric rectification. If there are saturated pixels, a nearest-neighbor procedure is used for the interpolated satellite radiance numbers; otherwise a cubic-convolution algorithm is used. Path radiance and path transmittance are calculated with a simple spectral model, which requires an estimate of the water vapor and aerosol content of the atmosphere. © 1981.
    • Article
    Reports (2013)
    In 2012 the Data Curation @ UCSB Project surveyed UCSB campus faculty and researchers on the subject of data curation, with the goals of 1) better understanding the scope of the digital curation problem and the curation services that are needed, and 2) characterizing the role that the UCSB Library might play in supporting curation of campus research outputs.  The findings argue for the establishment of a campus unit possessing data curation expertise and providing curation-related assistance to campus researchers, and possibly hosting curation services.
      Cover page: Faculty/Researcher Survey on Data Curation
      • Article
      • Peer Reviewed
      UC Santa Barbara Previously Published Works (2012)
      Environmental informatics uses large multidimensional, complex datasets to study environmental problems, which can be both discrete and continuous in space or time. These datasets and their requisite metadata can be managed by queryable databases. Geospatial Web application programming interfaces (APIs) provide remote access to dynamic subsets of environmental information. Persistent identifiers make data citable. The storage-computing trade-off is now heavily skewed in favor of moving calculations to the data. Provenance metadata help determine a data object's reliability and trustworthiness. Rising atmospheric CO2, the Antarctic ozone hole, and Gulf Stream warm-core rings were all discovered by analyzing long-term datasets. Similar work continues on mapping evapotranspiration and snow water equivalent. In these "fourth paradigm" problems, data (especially data collected operationally) drive hypothesis formation. Making data available requires new discovery mechanisms and policies favoring data sharing. Cloud computing and array-friendly databases will help bring processing to the data. Ubiquitous location sensing and geotagging will help turn citizen scientists into environmental information collectors. © Copyright ©2012 by Annual Reviews. All rights reserved.
        • Thesis
        • Peer Reviewed
        UC Santa Barbara Electronic Theses and Dissertations (2022)

        File-centricity is a paradigm in which files are the smallest unit of data. File-centricity has two significant advantages: 1) Files package data and thus allow data to be stored and distributed agnostic of their content. 2) Files provide a natural identity and even an identifier (the filename) to data, allowing us to reference and de-reference data. However, file-centricity leavesit to the individual data user to interpret the structure of file contents and align diverse data during extract, transform, and load (ETL) processes. My thesis is that the content-structure agnostic nature of files causes unnecessary bottlenecks in the flow from data to knowledge in environmental sciences. Unblocking those bottlenecks requires moving data processing paradigms away from file-centricity and towards data-centricity. In my dissertation, I address the ”twilight of file-centricity” and technologies required to transition from file-centricity to data-centricity. Moving towards data-centricity requires replacing files with individual observations as the smallest unit of data. In practical terms, this means storing data in a predefined schema in some form of database. However, this requires 1) the ability to identify data (rather than files). 2) data to be aligned, meaning attributes and dimensions have to be harmonized across datasets, allowing data comparison and association. This dissertation presents solutions to these two challenges: 1) With the web service Open-source Project for a Network Data Access Protocol (OPeNDAP) Citation Creator (OCCUR),I demonstrate how data queried through OPeNDAP servers can get assigned identities that can be referenced and de-referenced. 2) The Spatio-Temporal Adaptive-Resolution Encoding (STARE) software collection enables data-centric science. The collection contains software to spatiotemporally align data by using the universal spatiotemporal representation STARE. The collection further contains software to perform geospatial analysis and various storage backends. 3) In a science use case, I explore how spatiotemporal alignment of data can help simplify and improve environmental data science and demonstrate how analysis in a data-centric world can be carried out. Summarizing, this thesis provides solutions to central requirements to move towards data-centricity and into the twilight of files.

          Cover page: Towards the twilight of file-centricity
          • Article
          • Peer Reviewed
          UC Santa Barbara Previously Published Works (2016)
          This project investigates the energy-water usage efficiency of large scale civil infrastructure projects involving the artificial recharge of subsurface groundwater aquifers via the reuse of treated municipal wastewater. A modeling framework is introduced which explores the various ways in which spatially heterogeneous variables such as topography, landuse, and subsurface infiltration capacity combine to determine the physical layout of proposed reuse system components and their associated process energy-water demands. This framework is applied to the planning and evaluation of the energy-water usage efficiency of hypothetical reuse systems in five case study regions within the State of California. Findings from these case study analyses suggest that, in certain geographic contexts, the water requirements attributable to the process energy consumption of a reuse system can exceed the volume of water that it is able to recover by as much as an order of magnitude.
            Cover page: Investigating the Energy-Water Usage Efficiency of the Reuse of Treated Municipal Wastewater for Artificial Groundwater Recharge
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