6. Our Project

When we were first introduced to this project we were overwhelmed by the scope of it and by all of the tools necessary to complete it. Tools such as Geographic Resources Analysis Support System (GRASS GIS) and services such as OpenTopography and Daymet were all necessary components of this project which none of us had ever used or even heard of before. Tyson gave us a small introduction to these but to really understand them we had to dive in and use them ourselves.

We decided on using a bash script to solve this midterm project as it seemed like the simplest way to accomplish what was asked. To parallelize the calculations and distribute or script we decided that Makeflow and OpenStack would be necessary. Makeflow would be used to handle the calculations while OpenStack would be used as a distribution platform for our script. OpenStack would allow any individual with a Debian system to run our software which we felt provided the most coverage for users.

Our project is broken up into a handful of scripts that can be downloaded as a zip file from our GitHub page. The scripts each have a different function but all are necessary in order to run. Each one is described below:

• Install_master: This is the main script. It installs all necessary software (QGIS, GRASS GIS, GDAL, R, iCommands, etc...) and ensures they are all in the correct places.

• Get_tiles: Gets the correct tiles for our software and converts them into the correct projection.

• EEMT-Topo: Computes the EEMT topographical model.

• EEMT-Trad: Computes the traditional EEMT model.