Ryan Abernathey’s community and technical leadership in the development of a new paradigm for scientific computing and collaboration, contributions to open-source software libraries (xarray, xgcm, xmitgcm, xrft, pyqg, dask, pyviz), and focus on “enabling practical applications of Earth science through data visualization and information technology” fully align with the spirit and vision of the Charles S. Falkenberg Award, as stated in the description on the award’s website.

Ryan co-founded the Pangeo project, which set out to create an inclusive community working to improve collaborations between scientists and developers working on open-source scientific Python applications. This is an example of Ryan’s approach — he identified a critical shortcoming in how science was being accomplished and began building a community to address the issue. Scientists, like us, were spending much of their time struggling to use data. Instead of focusing on analysis and big science questions, many Earth scientists spend a substantial amount of their time limited by data access, data wrangling and data processing. Ryan’s work to flip this equation enables scientists to focus on their science and has created an ecosystem where community solutions address community problems. This approach builds bonds between scientists in disparate disciplines enabling truly transformational, interdisciplinary work.

With Ryan’s leadership, Pangeo has grown into a thriving open-source community and platform for many kinds of scientific research. Tangible examples of this growth include the number of active members in Pangeo’s community forum (>650), active users of Pangeo’s cloud deployments (>600) and peer-reviewed publications that use Pangeo tools (>50). Ryan’s consistent contributions in this space have resulted in past, present and future impacts across the computational geosciences — advancing the state of the art in data analysis and visualization while cultivating an open scientific community. Indeed, these impacts go well beyond the computational tools Ryan has helped build — advancing how scientists think about, collaborate on and publish their research.

It can be difficult to point to specific achievements of individuals when discussing open science and open-source software because they are community collaborations. To us, Ryan’s nomination for the Falkenberg Award is deserved because of his tireless efforts to build inclusive communities to improve how all of science is accomplished. This work benefits us all and is democratizing science.

— Chelle Gentemann
Farallon Institute 
Petaluma, California

— Joe Hamman 
National Center for Atmospheric Research 
Boulder, Colorado

Presentation Title: The Dependence of the Southern Ocean Residual MOC on Wind Strength

Event: 2010 Fall Meeting

Awarding Section: Ocean Sciences