Speaker: Katie Dagon,  NCAR

Abstract: The Earth System Data Science (ESDS) initiative at the National Center for Atmospheric Research / University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (NCAR/UCAR) aims to profoundly increase the effectiveness of our workforce by promoting deeper collaboration centered on analytics, improving our capacity to deliver impactful, actionable, reproducible science and serve the university community by transforming how geoscientists synthesize and extract information from large, diverse data sets. So what does that mean in practice? Over the past 3 years we have been building the ESDS community as a grassroots collaboration between cyberinfrastructure providers and Earth system scientists. Through conversations within the lab we aim to understand and communicate staff needs regarding analysis software, workflows, and training; and advocate for novel collaborative approaches and open science practices to tackle those needs. Our practices include organizing “collaborative work times”, as well as encouraging semi-public peer-to-peer chat, community-staffed office hours, and informal presentations as venues for knowledge sharing. More recently we have established a formal governance structure, and are actively working to expand engagement across the organization. This talk will highlight progress as well as challenges, and aim to stimulate a discussion on how lessons learned from our experience can be shared across the broader open science community.

Speaker Bio: Katie Dagon is a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, working in the Climate and Global Dynamics Laboratory. Her research focuses on modeling the impacts of climate change on land-atmosphere interactions, climate variability, and extreme events. She is also interested in machine learning approaches to climate science and modeling. She is passionate about open science and helps lead the NCAR/UCAR Earth System Data Science initiative.