George Serafino

SeaWiFS ocean color data archive and distribution system: assessment of system performance

The Sea-viewing Wide Field-of View Sensor (SeaWiFS) Mission has initiated a new era of ocean color remote sensing and has established performance benchmarks that will be emulated by subsequent missions. An integral element of the SeaWiFS mission is the data component, performed by the Goddard Earth Sciences Distributed Active Archive Center (GES DAAC), NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD. Since the beginning of data distribution in September 1997, the GES DAAC has managed the data archive and improved data distribution capability. SeaWiFS data products are archived in a primary, secondary, and tertiary archive structure, ensuring data preservation. Data distribution utilizes a World Wide Web (WWW)-based ordering interface, allowing distribution either electronically or on magnetic tape media. Automatic data subscriptions, supplying user-tailored data product selections, have yielded a high archive-to-distribution ratio. System improvements have increased efficiency and redundancy. The user interface has added features designed to facilitate data access and data usage, enhanced by WWW information resources and comprehensive online dataset documentation. As SeaWiFS enters the latter half of its five-year mission, a system performance assessment provides useful information for other Earth remote sensing missions and allows consideration of future usage objectives for the SeaWiFS data archive.

Applications of Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) data

Since the launch of TRMM, over three years of data have been collected. In addition to the archival and distribution of TRMM data, GDISC provides data subsets, and search, access and visualization services. Prototype GIS compatible data sets are created to facilitate wide dissemination to the application users.

Highlights of MODIS products

A new collection of Earth science data is now publicly available for the understanding of the land, ocean, and atmospheric interactions and how they affect our climate system. Approximately 40 higher level science standard products are being produced from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) high resolution radiances. MODIS data starting November 1, 2000 to the present have been processed with an improved calibration algorithm (version-3) and data products are available to the public and science user community. Nearly all of these products have been evaluated and found useful for science and various applications. Radiometric calibrated and geolocated radiance data and all derived atmospheric, land and ocean products are available free from NASAs Distributed Active Archive Centers (DAACs).

Knowledge discovery about scientific papers or proceedings referenced NASA/DAAC data with a rule-based classifier

Knowledge discovery from online journals, abstracts and citation indices, cross-referenced with the NASA Distributed Active Archive Center (DAAC) user/order database to close the data-knowledge loop. Knowledge discovery in database (KDD) has been defined as the nontrivial process of discovering valid, novel, potentially useful, and ultimately understandable patterns from data. The core step of the KDD process is data mining. Data mining is all about extracting patterns from an organizations stored or warehoused data. These patterns can be used to gain insight into aspects of the organizations operations and predict outcomes for future situations. Patterns often concern the categories to which situations belong. For example, here is the situation, to decide if a journal paper used the NASA DAAC data or not, starting from the Goddard DAAC user/order database record, a rule-based classifier was developed and rules were found firstly with training samples, then these rules were applied to recognize new patterns.

MODIS data ingest, processing, archiving and distribution at the Goddard Earth Sciences DAAC

This paper informs scientists, system developers and managers of science data about the current acquisition, processing and distribution of MODIS data at the NASA GES DAAC. In addition, this paper presents the Simple, Scalable, Script-based Science Processor (S4P), a data-driven processing system. This paper also discusses data product sizes and daily volumes, different mechanisms for ordering the data, data distribution policies and data subscription services. In particular, this paper describes a search and order Web interface developed at the GES DAAC that provides users with an efficient gateway to MODIS and other remote sensing data.

MODIS atmospheric data products at the Goddard Earth Sciences DAAC

The Goddard Earth Science (GES) Distributed Active Archive Center (DAAC), an integral part of the Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS), is the official source of Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) atmospheric data products for the science community. The MODIS instrument was launched in December 1999 onboard the Terra (formally AM-1) spacecraft and the GES DAAC has been successfully ingesting, processing, archiving, and distributing MODIS data since February 24, 2000. These measurements provide unique and much needed data for the atmospheric research and applications communities. The GES DAAC archives approximately 500 gigabytes (GB) of MODIS data per day. The full suite of atmosphere products is archived at the NASA GES DAAC at a rate of about 40 GB/day. A significant increase in the volume of atmospheric data being ingested, archived and distributed at the GES DAAC will occur when the MODIS instrument onboard the Aqua (formally PM-1) spacecraft begins transmission. The data are distributed to the community through a combination of EOS Data Gateways, the GES DAAC Search and Order World Wide Web (WWW) interface and an FTP site that contains samples of MODIS data. The MODIS Data Support Team (MDST) provides expert assistance to assist the users to turn data into information. The MDST Website is at http://daac.gsfc.nasa.gov/CAMPAIGN DOCS/MODIS/index.shtml.

Ocean data from MODIS at the NASA Goddard Earth Sciences DAAC

The Goddard Earth Science (GES) Distributed Active Archive Center (DAAC) plays a major role in enabling basic scientific research and providing access to scientific data to the general use community through the ingest, processing, archive and distribution of Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectro radiometer (MODIS) data. The full suite of ocean products is archived at the NASA GES DAAC at a rate of about 230 Gigabytes (GB)/day. A significant increase in the volume of ocean data being ingested, archived and distributed at the GES DAAC will occur when the data from the MODIS instrument onboard the Aqua (formally PM-I) spacecraft begins transmission. The challenge, to distribute such large volumes of data to the ocean community, is achieved through a combination of EOS Data Gateways, the GES DAAC Search and Order World Wide Web (WWW) interface, and an FTP site that contains samples of MODIS data.