Incoming data: Snow surface properties

The supercomputer processes data with esp and sends it, with SCP, to an NSIDC disk, in accordance with this interface. From here, the webapp back-end picks it up to prepare it for visualization by the webapp.

Allowing the supercomputer to be responsible for producing data and metadata, the webapp can focus on visualization and changes, for example adding new regions, won’t depend on the webapp to be also updated.

We need to to balance all of these concerns:

• Webapp load time: startup load time, and load time when changing regions & variables
• Webapp maintainability
• Flexibility to change webapp behavior by pushing different data from the supercomputer.
• Predictability in how the webapp will respond to data changes

Revisions

Current version: 1.0.0beta1

1.0.0

Initial release

Principles

• The webapp should be able to selectively load Sub Region data by selected Super Region
  • Rationale: minimizes webapp start-up time and overall download.
• Everything has an ID
  • Rationale: enables building relationships between Regions, Variables, etc. without sending too much extraneous data.
• Relative paths are relative to API root
  • Rationale: it’s less stateful to reconstruct a URL this way (as opposed to if the relative path was relative to the file containing it)
• Data from the supercomputer MAY be unminified.
  • Rationale: it can be minified on ingest.
• JSON attributes are camelCase.
  • Rationale: consistency is good, it doesn’t matter what we pick.

Specification

Important

All data and metadata has a provider.

• Version control: Data is version-controlled in this repository’s static/ directory.
• Supercomputer: Data is pushed dynamically on a schedule from the supercomputer.