The Climate community within the EuroScienceGateway project

From “innovators” (defined by Everett and Rogers in their book on “Diffusion of Innovations” as the first few individuals of a group who are eager to try and adopt a new idea) and having pioneered in a way the use of Galaxy and related tools outside of the original computational biology, the Galaxy Climate community now endeavours to reach the following stage, namely “early adopters”.

The leitmotiv behind the contribution of the Galaxy Climate community to the Work Package 5 is therefore to focus on “use cases” and entire workflows, rather than to develop isolated tools and/or "Swiss-army tools" meant to do everything but which in the end will not see much use and reuse.

To make an impression on potential users and trigger faster adoption we want to showcase workflows that will demonstrate the full potential of Galaxy and of the additional resources that it will be possible to leverage with the Pulsar Network.

When it comes to computing, pre/post processing and visualisation, typical tasks will largely exceed what "ordinary" users (i.e., beginners and/or non-specialists) can normally achieve on a laptop or small cluster, with the added benefits of rich metadata, consistency and reproducibility offered by workflows.

Flagship workflows for the climate use cases will be related to topical research into global change and aimed at raising awareness and characterising impacts by combining mainly information from models, satellites and authoritative meteorological/climate data providers, thereby demonstrating how straightforward it can be to get access to large amounts of reliable climate data with Galaxy, process it, and extract information that does make sense out of it.

In practice, for each use case we will:

1. Work on one (or more) comprehensive Jupyter Notebook(s) typically using the Pangeo stack and addressing/solving a particular use case.
2. Integrate the notebook into manageable and reusable “chunks” that could be converted into Galaxy tool.
3. Specify/identify the necessary tools. Which ones need to be added to Galaxy.
4. Explicitly define the corresponding input data (including provenance), parameters and outputs.
5. Develop wrappers for individual tools.
6. Assemble, test and validate the workflow.
7. Proceed with tutorials and/or associated training material.
8. Derive other potential usage of the new tools in different applications.
9. Explore the most appropriate channel(s) to communicate around the developed tools and workflows to reach a receptive audience (articles, events, etc.).