Kruskopf et al. (2025) ClimateServ: An open source earth observation climate data access tool

Identification

• Journal: Environmental Modelling & Software
• Year: 2025
• Date: 2025-09-27
• Authors: Meryl Kruskopf, Lance Gilliland, Brent Roberts, Amanda Markert, William Ashmall, Ashutosh Limaye
• DOI: 10.1016/j.envsoft.2025.106709

Research Groups

• Earth System Science Center, University of Alabama Huntsville, USA
• NASA Earth Science Branch, NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, USA
• Amentum, Space Exploration Division, USA
• Universities Space Research Association, USA
• Department of Atmospheric and Earth Science, University of Alabama in Huntsville, USA

Short Summary

This paper introduces ClimateSERV, an open-source web application and API developed by the SERVIR program, designed to lower barriers for users to visualize, analyze, and download curated Earth observation climate data for water and food security applications. It details the system's architecture, performance, and usage, including a case study demonstrating its utility in drought monitoring in Southeast Asia.

Objective

• To describe the features, architecture, performance, and real-world applications of ClimateSERV, an open-source tool facilitating access to Earth observation climate data for water and food security.

Study Configuration

• Spatial Scale: Global to regional, with data resolutions ranging from 250 meters to 111 kilometers. User-defined Areas of Interest (AOIs) are supported up to 10,000,000 square kilometers.
• Temporal Scale: Historical data records from 1981 to present, with daily, weekly, 3-day, 10-day, and 15-day temporal resolutions. Forecasts extend up to 180 days. Statistical analysis periods are limited to 20 years.

Methodology and Data

• Models used:
  • North American Multi-Model Ensemble (NMME) (e.g., CCSM4, CFSv2) for seasonal and subseasonal forecasts.
  • Regional Hydrologic Extremes Assessment System (RHEAS) framework (used in case study).
  • NASA SPORT Land Information System (LIS) for land parameters.
• Data sources:
  • Satellite/Observation: NASA IMERG (V06, V07), UCSB Climate Hazards InfraRed Precipitation with Station (CHIRPS 2.0), NASA SPORT Evaporative Stress Index (ESI), USDA Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP), NASA SMAP Sentinel-1, USGS eMODIS Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI).
  • Forecast: UCSB CHIRPS Global Ensemble Forecast System (GEFS), NOAA NMME.
  • Software/Tools: THREDDS Data Server (TDS), GeoNetwork, MapServer, PostgreSQL database, custom Python scripts for Extract Transform Load (ETL) pipelines, Rasterio, GDAL, Python Xarray.
  • Other: GeoLite2 database for IP geolocation.

Main Results

• ClimateSERV provides a user-friendly web application and a robust API for visualizing, analyzing, subsetting, and downloading a curated set of climate-related Earth observation datasets.
• The system's open-source architecture integrates components like TDS, GeoNetwork, MapServer, and PostgreSQL, with custom Python ETLs for data ingestion.
• API performance for spatial aggregation and time series retrieval is efficient, with most requests (median duration of 306 days) completing in under 20 seconds, and even large requests (10,000,000 square kilometers over 20 years) finishing within 341 seconds.
• Between 2023 and 2024, ClimateSERV recorded over one million data interactions from more than eleven thousand distinct users across 162 countries, with CHIRPS being the most accessed dataset.
• A case study in Southeast Asia demonstrated ClimateSERV's critical role in drought monitoring, where it supplies bias-corrected NMME data to the RHEAS framework, enabling the generation of drought bulletins for local stakeholders.

Contributions

• Developed and deployed ClimateSERV, an open-source platform that significantly lowers the technical and bandwidth barriers for non-expert users and resource-constrained regions to access and utilize Earth observation climate data.
• Provides server-side data processing capabilities (spatial aggregation, zonal statistics), which enhances efficiency and reduces data transfer requirements, particularly for large spatiotemporal queries.
• Curates a demand-driven collection of climate datasets directly relevant to critical applications such as water resources, food security, and drought monitoring.
• Demonstrated the practical application and societal impact of Earth observation data through a successful case study in Southeast Asia, aiding in drought preparedness and decision-making.

Funding

• Cooperative Agreement 80MSFC22N0004 between NASA and the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH).

Citation

@article{Kruskopf2025ClimateServ,
  author = {Kruskopf, Meryl and Gilliland, Lance and Roberts, Brent and Markert, Amanda and Ashmall, William and Limaye, Ashutosh},
  title = {ClimateServ: An open source earth observation climate data access tool},
  journal = {Environmental Modelling & Software},
  year = {2025},
  doi = {10.1016/j.envsoft.2025.106709},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsoft.2025.106709}
}