Title
A spatiotemporal indexing approach for efficient processing of big array-based climate data with MapReduce.
Abstract
Climate observations and model simulations are producing vast amounts of array-based spatiotemporal data. Efficient processing of these data is essential for assessing global challenges such as climate change, natural disasters, and diseases. This is challenging not only because of the large data volume, but also because of the intrinsic high-dimensional nature of geoscience data. To tackle this challenge, we propose a spatiotemporal indexing approach to efficiently manage and process big climate data with MapReduce in a highly scalable environment. Using this approach, big climate data are directly stored in a Hadoop Distributed File System in its original, native file format. A spatiotemporal index is built to bridge the logical array-based data model and the physical data layout, which enables fast data retrieval when performing spatiotemporal queries. Based on the index, a data-partitioning algorithm is applied to enable MapReduce to achieve high data locality, as well as balancing the workload. The proposed indexing approach is evaluated using the National Aeronautics and Space Administration NASA Modern-Era Retrospective Analysis for Research and Applications MERRA climate reanalysis dataset. The experimental results show that the index can significantly accelerate querying and processing ~10× speedup compared to the baseline test using the same computing cluster, while keeping the index-to-data ratio small 0.0328%. The applicability of the indexing approach is demonstrated by a climate anomaly detection deployed on a NASA Hadoop cluster. This approach is also able to support efficient processing of general array-based spatiotemporal data in various geoscience domains without special configuration on a Hadoop cluster.
Year
DOI
Venue
2017
10.1080/13658816.2015.1131830
International Journal of Geographical Information Science
Keywords
Field
DocType
Spatiotemporal index, big climate data, array-based, Hadoop MapReduce, HDFS, NASA MERRA, climate change
File format,Anomaly detection,Data mining,Data processing,Data retrieval,Computer science,Search engine indexing,Data model,Big data,Computer cluster
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
31
1
1365-8816
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
19
0.81
10
Authors
7
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
zhenlong li111210.47
Fei Hu21348.33
John L. Schnase3444105.61
Daniel Q. Duffy4625.54
Tsengdar Lee5190.81
Michael K. Bowen6221.22
Chaowei Yang784156.47