SF34A-01 16:00h
Distributed Technologies in a Data Pool
A Data Pool is an on-line repository providing interactive and programmatic access to data products through a variety of services. The University of Alabama in Huntsville has developed and deployed such a Data Pool in conjunction with the DISCOVER project, a collaboration with NASA and Remote Sensing Systems. DISCOVER provides long-term ocean and climate data from a variety of passive microwave satellite instruments, including such products as sea-surface temperature and wind, air temperature, atmospheric water vapor, cloud water and rain rate. The Data Pool provides multiple methods to access and visualize these products, including conventional HTTP and FTP access, as well as data services that provide for enhanced usability and interoperability, such as GridFTP, OPeNDAP, OpenGIS-compliant web mapping and coverage services, and custom subsetting and packaging services. This paper will focus on the distributed service technologies used in the Data Pool, which spans heterogeneous machines at multiple locations. For example, in order to provide seamless access to data at multiple sites, the Data Pool provides catalog services for all data products at the various data server locations. Under development is an automated metadata generation tool that crawls the online data repositories regularly to dynamically update the Data Pool catalog with information about newly generated data files. For efficient handling of data orders across distributed repositories, the Data Pool also implements distributed data processing services on the file servers where the data resides. Ontologies are planned to support automated service chaining for custom user requests. The UAH Data Pool is based on a configurable technology framework that integrates distributed data services with a web interface and a set of centralized database services for catalogs and order tracking. While this instantiation of the Data Pool was implemented to meet the needs of the DISCOVER project, the framework was designed for reuse with other small- or large-scale data and information management projects, and is especially suited for distributed collaborations.
http://datapool.nsstc.nasa.gov
SF34A-02 16:15h
A Spatial Portal for Accessing NOAA's Observing Systems
The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) monitors the earth environment with tens of thousands of sensors in over one hundred observing systems, ranging from satellites to marine sonars to human observations of marine mammal populations. In 2003, NOAA initiated its first-ever comprehensive review of these diverse observing systems and their interrelationships to create the baseline NOAA Observing System Architecture (NOSA). The baseline NOSA was constructed with the assistance of all research and operational observing system managers within NOAA. It includes information about observing system owners, purposes, requirements and costs. The locations of these observing systems have been incorporated into a single geospatial database managed by NOAA's National Geophysical Data Center. This database supports several web tools for exploring these observing systems. First, an interactive map allows users to locate observing systems in a particular area and do simple spatial queries involving several observing systems (i.e. find all observatories from observing system A that are within 50km of observatories from observing system B). The map also provides links to observing system home pages and to data pages for specific observatories if they are available. A "Find Your Place" tool enables users to locate observatories in selected geographic regions (e.g., by ecoregion, watershed, state, congressional district), and a "Web Image Slide Tray" provides quick access to simple maps that make it easy to compare coverage of different observing systems in a given state or region. These tools and more information about the NOSA project are available from http://nosa.noaa.gov.
http://nosa.noaa.gov
SF34A-03 16:30h
The OCEANIDS Operational Data Management System
OCEANIDS is a high reliability system that acts as a clearinghouse in support of mission critical and near real-time data flows. The system interfaces with multiple data providers using simple protocols to automatically ingest data streams, create a short-term rolling store and distribute the data to multiple users. The system has built in redundancy to ensure continuous operations and has automated monitoring functionalities. In addition, the system can trigger remote processes when predefined conditions exist and thereby create value-added products with a quick turn around. OCEANIDS has been adopted as one of the core systems within the operations of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory Physical Oceanography Distributed Active Archive Center (JPL PO.DAAC) and is currently used to manage over 30 satellite data streams, including Aqua AMSR-E, Grace, Topex/Poseidon, Jason-1, SeaWinds and WindSat. The system interfaces with several national and international flight projects, as well as science data processing centers within industry and at various universities.
SF34A-04 16:45h
CalClim: An accessible data archive to monitor California climate
Climate data for the state of California has historically been provided by several independent sources, requiring time-consuming searches to find the appropriate information. The CalClim California Climate Data Archive (CCDA) provides centralized climate data access to assist those interested in monitoring California climate variability and change. The CalClim website (http://www.calclim.dri.edu) is a gateway to a number of climate observation networks that operate in California, including NWS Cooperative Network, SNOTEL, Remote Automated Weather Station (RAWS), and other statewide and regional networks. This archive enables scientists, state agencies and others with California interests to retrieve climate data at their convenience, for periods from days to years, and from one or multiple networks. Software on the website can also produce summaries of data, and graphs of daily or monthly data with options such as running means. Currently a limited selection of data is available, but additional datasets will be added over the next several months to one year. A coastal-focused climate data archive is anticipated to be added in early 2005. Both graphical and text interfaces are used to select networks and/or individual stations. Other products available at the website include the monthly California Climate Watch online newsletter and recent climate maps for periods ranging from the last week to 3 years, updated daily. A climate metadata inventory for the state is being assembled in conjunction with this project, and will be made available online at its completion. An additional aspect in development involves support of an enhanced California climate monitoring network.
http://www.calclim.dri.edu
SF34A-05 17:00h
Innovative Web-Based Tool for the Mars Odyssey THEMIS Science Dataset
The Mars Space Flight Facility at Arizona State University (ASU) is responsible for the operation and data processing, analysis, and validation for several NASA science experiments currently in operation at Mars. These experiments include the Mars Global Surveyor Thermal Emission Spectrometer (TES) and the Mars Odyssey Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS). As a Data Node for the NASA Planetary Data System (PDS), the ASU team is also responsible for the distribution and archiving of the science data from these experiments. Previous PDS data distribution methods were based on non-volatile media storage, and distribution to the science community via mass-mailings. However, due to the increase in data volumes for recent science experiments, the PDS is now pursuing new ways of distributing these larger datasets. The ASU mission operations team has led the way in the development of web-based interfaces for the TES and THEMIS PDS datasets. The TES web-based data interface is a simple indexed version of the PDS CD-ROM volumes along with supporting documentation. This interface was developed to support the increasing data volumes (8,820 products, 210 volumes, 126 Gbytes) from the experiment as it entered into its extended mission phase in 2001. Although the TES data interface is simple, it was an early attempt to provide a convenient online interface of a science data archive to the community. The THEMIS camera on the Mars Odyssey spacecraft has acquired a large number of infrared and visible images at Mars, resulting in a data volume far greater than previous PDS data archives (246,365 image products, 1,566 Gbytes). Due to the size of this dataset, a more innovative approach to an online data archive had to be developed. The THEMIS web-based data interface (http://themis-data.asu.edu) provides an intuitive and powerful interface to this dataset and the supporting documentation. Users can utilize a form-based database interface to identify images that match specific criteria or select individual image footprints on a graphical map that provides pan and zoom capabilities. For each selected image, a page is dynamically generated that provides a number of browsing features and online processing options, as well as links to download the PDS compliant standard data products. A clickable thumbnail of the selected image is displayed along with a context image and all ancillary data. Options allow the user to select the context image of the region, cut from a variety of base maps including MOLA, MOC, TES thermal inertia or albedo, and THEMIS infrared mosaics. Users can browse each band of a multi-band image and apply some basic processing to it online before saving it in one of several standard image formats. Georectified versions of the multi-band PDS data products can also be downloaded in a variety of formats, allowing them to be ingested directly into popular processing packages such as ESRI, ENVI and VICAR. This tool is continually being improved as additional user requests are received. The THEMIS web-based PDS data interface has received numerous positive reviews from the science community and serves as a benchmark for future Mars experiments.
http://themis-data.asu.edu
SF34A-06 17:15h
JMARS, A GIS System for Mars
We have developed a full-featured, geographic information system for Mars that provides an easy to use, intuitive interface to remote sensing data, including data from THEMIS, MOC, MOLA, TES and Viking. Using a layer-based GUI, users can browse more than 2TB of projected and co-registered maps and images, and composite them along with their own local data products into 2-D and 3-D scenes. Analysis tools allow for various functions such as extracting quantitative values (temperature, thermal inertia, albedo, elevation, etc), viewing, editing and creating shape files, and measuring distances and areas. These products can be individually stretched and colorized, blended and mosaiced, draped over topography for 3-D visualization and exported in a georeferenced format. The client application is available for download from the Internet (http://jmars.asu.edu), or by CD-ROM. Unlike any of the web-based interfaces that are available to browse Mars data, this application can provide a number of useful features even without Internet access, making it useful for both the professional planetary scientist and in the K-12 and higher education environments. This project represents more than 16 man-years of development, supported by the NASA Mars Odyssey and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter missions, and the ASU Planetary Imaging and Analysis Facility and Advanced Training Institute (PIAFATI).
http://jmars.asu.edu
SF34A-07 17:30h
Intelligent Systems Technologies and Utilization of Earth Observation Data
The last decade's influx of raw data and derived geophysical parameters from several Earth observing satellites to NASA data centers has created a data-rich environment for Earth science research and applications. For example, the Distributed Active Archive Centers of NASA's Earth Observing System Data and Information System held over 2.8 petabytes of data at the end of 2003, growing at a rate of about 3 terabytes per day. The data products are distributed to a large community of scientific researchers, educators and operational government agencies. With advances in computational hardware, networks, information management and software technologies, much progress has been made over the last decade in data archiving and providing data access for a broad, diverse user community. However, to realize the full potential of the growing archives of valuable scientific data, further progress is necessary in the transformation of data into information, and information into knowledge that can be used in particular applications. The set of providers of data and services pertaining to archiving and distribution of Earth science data is quite heterogeneous and distributed today and is likely to be even more so in the future. This is due to the diversity of Earth Science disciplines and the distribution of expertise needed to provide data and services in those disciplines. Thus, in typical real world applications scenarios, the data and services will be obtained through service chains involving multiple data archive sites or systems. It is in this context that the development of technologies to improve data utilization must occur. Sponsored by NASA's Intelligent Systems Project within the Computing, Information and Communication Technology Program, a conceptual architecture study has been conducted to examine ideas to improve data utilization by adding intelligence into the archives in the context of an overall knowledge building system. Potential Intelligent Archive concepts include: - Mining archived data holdings using Intelligent Data Understanding algorithms to improve metadata to facilitate data access and usability - Building intelligence about transformations on data, information, knowledge, and accompanying services involved in a scientific enterprise - Recognizing the value of results, indexing and formatting them for easy access, and delivering them to concerned individuals - Interacting as a cooperative node in a web of distributed systems to perform knowledge building (i.e., transformations from data to information to knowledge) instead of just data pipelining - Being aware of other nodes in the knowledge building system, participating in open systems interfaces and protocols for virtualization, and collaborative interoperability Some issues we present are: scalability of algorithms that involve intelligent data understanding to enable mining of large data holdings and improve metadata; automated discovery of datasets appropriate to a given application and ingesting them automatically into the users' computational environment; automated quality assessment to facilitate ensuring data quality in large distributed archives; and performance optimization in intelligent archives.
http://daac.gsfc.nasa.gov/IDA/
SF34A-08 17:45h
The Invasive Species Forecasting System: A Space-Based Decision Support Infrastructure for Managing Biological Invasions
The spread of invasive species is one of the most daunting environmental, economic, and human-health problems facing the United States and the World today. It is one of several grand challenge environmental problems being addressed by NASA's Science Mission Directorate through a national application partnership with the US Geological Survey. NASA and USGS are working together to develop a National Invasive Species Forecasting System (ISFS) for the management and control of invasive species on Department of Interior and adjacent lands. As part of this effort, we are using NASA's EOS Clearing House (ECHO) framework to create an Invasive Species Data Service (ISDS). The ISDS will be a networked service that integrates a suite of NASA remote sensing data providers with the ecological field data resources of the National Biological Information Infrastructure (NBII). Aggregated ISDS data will feed directly into ISFS analysis routines to produce landscape-scale predictive maps of species distributions. ISDS and the ECHO framework thus provide an efficient interface between existing NASA data systems and decision support systems that are the province of federal agencies and other national organizations. The effort significantly broadens the use of NASA data in managing the Nation's invasive species threat. In this talk, we will describe the NASA/USGS invasive species partnership, provide an overview of the Invasive Species Forecasting System, and show how we are using ECHO technologies as the middle-ware framework for a comprehensive Invasive Species Data Service.
http://invasivespecies.gsfc.nasa.gov