Development of an Interactive Visualization and Training Toolkit for Climate Impacts on the Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary
Source: Marine Emporium Landing
This is a repository holding all code relating to the development of a training toolkit and the web application for the Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary as well as the Climate Data Lab use. This is a capstone project for the Master of Environmental Data Science at Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, University of California, Santa Barbara.
A brief summary on this project can be found on the Bren website found here.
Channel Islands Marine Sanctuary (CINMS) comprises 1,470 square miles surrounding Northern Channel Islands: Anacapa, Santa Cruz, Santa Rosa, San Miguel, and Santa Barbara islands that protects various species and habitats. However, these sensitive habitats are highly susceptible to climate-driven ‘shock’ events, which are associated with extreme values of temperature, pH, or ocean nutrient levels. A particularly devastating example was seen in 2014-16, when extreme temperatures and changes in nutrient conditions off the California coast led to large-scale die-offs of marine organisms (Sanford, E., Sones, J.L., García-Reyes, M. et al.).
The objective of this project is to develop an educational toolkit and an interactive, Python-based web application to visualize ecologically significant climate variables within Channel Islands and Southern California. These notebooks can be used by any climate scientist or researcher interested in utilizing large ensemble climate models, particularly CESM1.0 dataset. The web application will be used by Channel Islands Marine Sanctuary staff in collaboration with Dr. Stevenson-Michener to develop new indicators of shocks to marine ecosystems. The educational toolkit, composed of Jupyter notebooks, will be part of the ongoing development to promote the use of large ensembles through the Climate DataLab training environment.
CESM-LE Distinguishing between model error and natural climate variations can be tricky. To address this challenge, the CESM community developed the CESM Large Ensemble (CESM-LE) specifically to help understand climate change while considering natural fluctuations. All simulations within CESM-LE utilize a single CMIP5 model, which is the CESM with the Community Atmosphere Model version 5. The plots created in this dashboard were created using CESM version 1 (CESM1). A paper detailing the advantages of using CESM-LE can be found here.
This repository holds the three various notebooks that users can clone from to use for themselves:
The file structure is as seen below:
This repository holds the code created to make the web application, including the data used to generate the visualizations.
The file structure is as seen below:
Project manager: Patricia Park
Communications manager: Olivia Holt
Data Manager/ Product Leader: Diana Navarro
Client/Faculty Advisor: Samantha Stevenson