High Performance Computing for Address Level Climate Data Extraction

Keywords: Cluster computing, climate, PostGIS, address, longitudinal
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Sunday
Session Start / End Time: 2/27/2022 05:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/27/2022 06:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 63

Abstract

Project Viva is a Boston based longitudinal study including a cohort of some 6,000 mothers and children. The goal of Project Viva is to find ways to improve the health of mothers and their children by looking at the effects of mother's diet as well as other factors during pregnancy and after birth. A key part of the analysis is calculating various social and environmental exposures at the Viva cohort member address locations. For this part of the project, daily precipitation, temperature, and humidity estimates were extracted for 4,796 cohort address locations for the years 1999 – 2017, resulting in over 10 million patient/days of calculations. Input climate data is the 800-meter resolution PRISM Spatial Climate Dataset for the Conterminous United States (PRISM=Parameter-elevation Relationships on Independent Slopes Model, Oregon State University). The PRISM dataset is published in .BIL raster format, with one raster representing one climate variable per day. Data extraction is executed on a high-performance computing cluster running a PostgreSQL database with the PostGIS extension. This presentation will discuss details of this project including methods used, code developed, processing time statistics, project conclusions, and next steps.