Summary This article discusses the technologies and implementation of a climate data portal. This portal provides researchers and community stakeholders access to climatological data and resources, currently focusing on the state of Hawai'i. The portal provides interactive access to and visualization of hosted historical and near‐real‐time gridded maps and aggregated sensor station observational data. Climate data (currently precipitation and temperature) from sensor stations are collected, quality controlled, and processed daily to produce high‐resolution gridded maps of climate data. A publicly available web application allows users to navigate the available data and visualize the produced gridded data products and sensor stations data on an interactive map element, view information about the sensor stations used to produce a given map, and generate time series from sensor station data. The portal can also generate packages of data to export from the application. The portal is designed to host and disseminate any climatological variables that can be processed into a set of observational data and gridded value maps. The established workflow and automation procedure is generally extensible to additional variables and will be used similarly to expand the scope of the portal.

Abstract This article discusses the design and implementation of the Hawai'i Groundwater Recharge Tool, an application for providing data and analyses of the impacts of land‐cover modifications and changes in precipitation on groundwater‐recharge rates for the island of O'ahu. This application uses simulation data based on a set of 29 land‐cover types and 2 precipitation conditions to provide users with real‐time recharge calculations for interactively defined land‐cover modifications. The tool provides two visualizations, representing the land cover for the island and the resultant groundwater‐recharge rates, and a set of metrics indicating the changes to groundwater recharge for relevant areas to present a set of easily interpretable outcomes based on user‐defined scenarios. Users have varying degrees of control over the granularity of data input and output, allowing for the quick production of a roughly defined scenario, or more precise land‐cover definitions. These modifications can be exported for further analysis. Heuristics are used to provide a responsive user interface and performant integration with the database containing the full set of simulation data. This tool is designed to provide user‐friendly access to the information on the impacts of land‐cover and precipitation changes on groundwater‐recharge rates needed to assist in making data‐driven decisions.

Summary Scholars worldwide leverage science gateways/virtual research environments (VREs) for a wide variety of research and education endeavors spanning diverse scientific fields. Evaluating the value of a given science gateway/VRE to its constituent community is critical in obtaining the financial and human resources necessary to sustain operations and increase adoption in the user community. In this article, we feature a variety of exemplar science gateways/VREs and detail how they define impact in terms of, for example, their purpose, operation principles, and size of user base. Further, the exemplars recognize that their science gateways/VREs will continuously evolve with technological advancements and standards in cloud computing platforms, web service architectures, data management tools and cybersecurity. Correspondingly, we present a number of technology advances that could be incorporated in next‐generation science gateways/VREs to enhance their scope and scale of their operations for greater success/impact. The exemplars are selected from owners of science gateways in the Science Gateways Community Institute (SGCI) clientele in the United States, and from the owners of VREs in the International Virtual Research Environment Interest Group (VRE‐IG) of the Research Data Alliance. Thus, community‐driven best practices and technology advances are compiled from diverse expert groups with an international perspective to envisage futuristic science gateway/VRE innovations.

Summary The explosion of IoT devices and sensors in recent years has led to a demand for efficiently storing, processing and analyzing time‐series data. Geoscience researchers use time‐series data stores such as Hydroserver, Virtual Observatory and Ecological Informatics System (VOEIS), and Cloud‐Hosted Real‐time Data Service (CHORDS). Many of these tools require a great deal of infrastructure to deploy and expertise to manage and scale. The Tapis framework, an NSF funded project, provides science as a service APIs to allow researchers to achieve faster scientific results, by eliminating the need to set up a complex infrastructure stack. The University of Hawai'i (UH) and Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) have collaborated to develop an open source Tapis Streams API that builds on the concepts of the CHORDS time series data service to support research. This new hosted service allows storing, processing, annotating, archiving, and querying time‐series data in the Tapis multi‐user and multi‐tenant collaborative platform. The Streams API provides a hosted production level middleware service that enables new data‐driven event workflows capabilities that may be leveraged by researchers and Tapis powered science gateways for handling spatially indexed time‐series datasets.