NACSE combines reliable software engineering of decision support systems with mapping and climatology to help managers and practicing scientists & engineers manage natural resources, agriculture, and other systems. The development of high-resolution nationwide PRISM weather and climate datasets requires a complex array of linked systems that perform daily data ingestion (from > 50,000 stations), quality control, modeling, and production. Near real-time quality control checks are performed on vast amounts of data as part of an automated statistical-topographical modeling process that models each individual grid cell as it moves across the country. By merging these weather and climate datasets with domain-specific, heterogenous data we develop software that allows users to play with different scenarios and make science-based decisions influenced by, for example, freeze dates for particular agricultural regions, precipitation patterns affecting crop insurance claims, or air pollution in areas measured via lichen bioaccumulation.
Dylan Keon is an Assistant Professor (Sr Res) in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Oregon State University, and is the Associate Director of the Northwest Alliance for Computational Science & Engineering (NACSE). He has worked in the areas of spatial analysis, spatio-temporal data storage and processing, weather and climate data production, and decision support systems for over 20 years. He currently directs operations on several USDA-funded projects, with prior research funded by USDA, DOI, USGS, NSF, and various state and local agencies. He holds a Ph.D. in computational geography and M.S. in plant ecology & GIS/statistics, both from Oregon State University, and a B.S. in botany from Western Michigan University.