A Case for Planetary Computing / Mar 2023
Preprint of planetary computing paper. Patrick led this work making the case for infrastructure to handle the ingestion, transformation, analysis, and publication of global data products for environmental science and policy-making. Drawing on our experiences working with environmental scientists on forest carbon and biodiversity preservation, we classify existing solutions by their flexibility in processing geospatial data and their support for building trust through traceability and reproducibility. The paper identifies research gaps around handling continuously changing datasets collected across decades that require careful access control. It's a call to action for the computing community to build better infrastructure for planetary-scale environmental data.