The Future of Earth-System Data Infrastructure
Dr. Ryan Abernathey | Columbia University
09.25.23 @ 1 p.m. EDT
HYBRID – 33/H114 or Teams

Responding to the climate crisis requires a coordinated mobilization of academic research, government agencies, and a rapidly growing suite of private companies (broadly described as “climate tech”) aimed at addressing climate change adaptation and mitigation through commercial products and services. At the heart of this work is data: exabytes of data about the earth system, originating from satellites, sensors, and simulations and passing through many stages of processing and refinement as they reach end-user applications. The growth of AI is also fueling an insatiable demand for data across the board while also producing new sources of data, as AI-driven forecasts begin to emerge. Earth system data has many more users and use cases than it did a decade ago. These trends require us to rethink our approach to data infrastructure, which has traditionally emphasized a one-way exchange of data files from a few large data providers to data consumers. My talk will review exciting recent progress in moving towards a cloud-native earth-system-data ecosystem, incorporating lessons from my work on open-source software such as Xarray, Zarr, and Pangeo. I’ll conclude with a vision for how a truly frictionless global data infrastructure can enable a radically more effective response to the climate crisis while also empowering those most impacted by climate change—largely in the developing world—to play a greater role in solutions.

Dr. Ryan Abernathey is co-founder of 2i2c and EarthMover. He is an Associate Professor at Columbia University, where he leads the Ocean Transport Group.