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There is currently no consensus on how quickly the Greenland ice sheet is melting due to global warming, and what the ramifications will be for the rise in sea level. Sea level rise is a grave concern, due to its potential impact on coastal populations, global economies, and national security. Therefore, the ice-sheet science community is striving to improve their understanding of the problem. This community consists of two groups that perform related but distinct kinds of science: a data community, and a model building community. Broadly, the data community characterizes past and current states of the ice sheets, by assembling data from past events and from satellite observations. The modeling community, meanwhile, seeks to explain and forecast the speed and extent of ice sheet melting and subsequent sea level rise, by developing and validating computational models to explain these changes. Although ice sheet experimental data and models are dependent on one another, these two groups of scientists are not well integrated; better coordination is needed between data collection efforts and modeling efforts if we are to improve our understanding of ice sheet melting rates. These two scientific communities must build closer ties in order to better validate models and reduce prediction uncertainties. We present a new science gateway, GHub, that is taking form as a collaboration space for ice sheet scientists in academia and government agencies alike. This gateway, built on the HUBzero platform, will host datasets and modeling workflows, and provide access to codes for community tool building. First, we aim to collect, centralize, and fuse existing datasets, creating new data products that more completely catalog the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica. Second, we plan to build workflows that provide support for correct model validation and improve uncertainty quantification, thus extending existing ice sheet models. Finally, we will host existing community codes. We will install codes such as CmCt on the gateway server itself, and others, such as ISSM, on gateway-accessible high-performance computing resources, so that scientists can build new tools utilizing them. A natural objective of this gateway is to provide a unifying location where these disparate scientific communities may gather, mingle, and collaborate, using collaborative gateway features with the goal of doing better science. Overall, this gateway will be a major step towards accomplishing goals that were identified by a recent NSF workshop on the Greenland ice sheet. With this new cyberinfrastructure, ice sheet scientists will gain improved tools to quantify the rate and extent of sea level rise, for the benefit of human societies around the globe.
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