Suhung Shen

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.

Development of Information-Computational Infrastructure for Environmental Research in Siberia as a Baseline Component of the Northern Eurasia Earth Science Partnership Initiative (NEESPI) Studies

This chapter provides a brief description of the information resources currently supporting environmental studies of Siberia including key references and points of contact. It describes environmental, hydrological, and meteorological datasets available for Siberia as well as the tools developed to organize and seamlessly deliver these data to the international research community for studying regional environmental and climatic dynamics of the ongoing global changes. Three-hour and daily datasets of major meteorological characteristics measured at the Siberian weather stations and relevant metadata sets are the first tangible resources available to the researchers. However, most of the Siberian territory is sparsely populated and the observational networks that provide regional in situ observations are also sparse. Therefore, other information resources described below are based upon, or include as their integral part, remote sensing and model output data. These resources are (a) land information system for Siberia that includes cartographical materials, data of different inventories and surveys, diverse databases of in situ measurements and remote sensing products, and numerous auxiliary models for assessment of relevant biophysical indicators of Siberian ecosystems; (b) remote sensing Earth observation products and tools for data search, data access, data visualization, and analysis over Siberia; and (c) a suite of online systems to monitor, process, visualize, analyze, and access Earth science remote sensing products and regional climatic and meteorological geospatial datasets, as well as a variety of geospatial data on climate, climate forecast, hydrology, hydrological forecast, environmental remote sensing, socioeconomic information, etc.

The NASA NEESPI Data Portal to Support Studies of Climate and Environmental Changes in Non-boreal Europe

NASA NEESPI (Northern Eurasia Earth Science Partnership Initiative) data portal is a NASA funded project that focuses on collecting satellite remote sensing data, providing tools, information, and services in support of NEESPI scientific objectives (Leptoukh, et al., 2007). The data can be accessed online through anonymous ftp, through an advanced data searching and ordering system Mirador that uses keywords to find data quickly in a Google-like interface, and through the Goddard Interactive Online Visualization ANd aNalysis Infrastructure (Giovanni). The portal provides preprocessed data from different satellite sensors and numerical models to the same spatial and temporal resolution and the same projection so that the data can be used easily to perform inter-comparison or relationship studies. In addition, it provides parameter and spatially subsetted data for regional studies. Studies of regional carbon, hydrology, aerosols in non-boreal Europe and their interactions with global climate are very challenging research topics. The NASA NEESPI data portal makes many satellite data available for such studies, including information on land cover types, fire, vegetation index, aerosols, land surface temperature, soil moisture, precipitation, snow/ice, and other parameters. This paper will introduce the features and products available in the system, focusing on the online data 1 tool, Giovanni NEESPI. An example that explores different data through Giovanni NEESPI in temperate region of non-boreal Europe will be presented.