IN11D-01
Plugging Into GEOSS - A Data Center Takes the Leap
The data sets managed and distributed by the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado are accessible through a variety of interfaces: custom web services, WIST, which is the NASA EOS Data System interface, and by simple FTP. The Global Earth Observation System of Systems, GEOSS, offers the potential to make our data visible and accessible in the context of a much larger and more widely available system. But what does a data center have to do to tie into this larger system? What are the optimal data formats and protocols that should be maintained? What metadata standards and services should we sustain in order to maximize the visibility of our data? How will our holdings in existing catalogs be harvested by GEOSS? We address these questions through a pilot study that we report on in this paper. On June 2, 2008 the Group on Earth Observation, GEO, announced that the GEOSS Common Infrastructure (GCI) was "open for business," and that this Initial Operating Capability (IOC) was beginning a 1-year testing and evaluation period. The purpose of the IOC is two-fold: first, to encourage Earth observation providers to populate GEOSS by registering their data sets, services, and other components; and 2) to allow the global community to use, evaluate and thereby improve the GCI. NSIDC is contributing to both objectives. The GEOSS 10-Year Implementation Plan specifies, at a very high level, recommended standards for connectivity for services, data and metadata. GEO has also published Tactical and Strategic Guidance Documents to help data providers like NSIDC decide how it should proceed to become an active participant in the GEOSS. GEOSS and NSIDC are both adopting many of the OGC standards as their respective systems evolve. But how well do the OGC implementations of each of these entities mesh? What are the gaps, what are the currently less well developed yet critical path standards that require work? We describe our experiences in registering several data sets having differing levels and types of associated services. We review the GEOSS efforts and study their published requirements and standards and see how well they mesh to the NSIDC systems, metadata and data distribution systems, and then describe our experiences in making our data and services available via the GCI.
IN11D-02
A modern plant-climate research dataset for modelling eastern North American plant taxa.
Continental-scale modern pollen-climate data repositories are a primary data source for paleoclimate reconstructions. However, these repositories can contain artifacts, such as records from different depositional environment and replicate records, that can influence the observed pollen-climate relationships as well as the paleoclimate reconstructions derived from these relationships. In this paper, we address the issues related to these artifacts as we define the methods used to create a research dataset from the North American Modern Pollen Database (Whitmore et al., 2005). Additionally, we define the methods used to select the environmental variables that are best for modeling regional pollen-climate relationships from the research dataset. Because the depositional environment determines the relative strengths of the local and regional pollen signals, combining data from different depositional environments results in pollen abundances that can be influenced by the local pollen signal. Replicate records in pollen-climate datasets can skew pollen-climate relationships by causing an over- or under- representation of pollen abundances in climate space. When these two artifacts are combined, the errors introduced into pollen-climate relationship modeling are compounded. The research dataset we present consists of 2,613 records in eastern North America, of which 70.9% are lacustrine sites. We demonstrate that this new research database improves upon the modeling of regional pollen-climate relationships for eastern North American taxa. The research dataset encompasses the majority of the temperature and mean summer precipitation ranges of the NAMPD's climatic range and 40% of its mean winter precipitation range. NAMPD sites with higher winter precipitation are located along the northwestern coast of North America where a rainshadow effect produces abundant winter precipitation. We present our analysis of the research dataset for use in paleoclimate reconstructions, and recommend that mean winter and summer temperature and precipitation variables be used for pollen-climate relationship modeling.
IN11D-03
NASA Earth Observations (NEO): Data Imagery for Education and Visualization
NASA Earth Observations (NEO) has dramatically simplified public access to georeferenced imagery of NASA
remote sensing data. NEO targets the non-traditional data users who are currently underserved by
functionality and formats available from the existing data ordering systems. These users include formal and
informal educators, museum and science center personnel, professional communicators, and citizen
scientists.
NEO currently serves imagery from 45 different datasets with daily, weekly, and/or monthly temporal
resolutions, with more datasets currently under development. The imagery from these datasets is produced
in coordination with several data partners who are affiliated either with the instrument science teams or with
the respective data processing center.
NEO is a system of three components -- website, WMS (Web Mapping Service), and ftp archive -- which
together are able to meet the wide-ranging needs of our users. Some of these needs include the ability to:
view and manipulate imagery using the NEO website -- e.g., applying color palettes, resizing, exporting to a
variety of formats including PNG, JPEG, KMZ (Google Earth), GeoTIFF; access the NEO collection via a
standards-based API (WMS); and create customized exports for select users (ftp archive) such as Science on
a Sphere, NASA's Earth Observatory, and others.
http://neo.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/
IN11D-04
NOAA's Approach to Integration of its Environmental Data Management Services
NOAA is making substantial progress in enhancing the ability of users to discover, access, and use the vast amount of environmental information that it collects, maintains, and stores. It has defined a Global Earth Observation – Integrated Data Environment (GEO-IDE) initiative to promote and enable the interoperability of its own data management services and to ensure that they are compatible and aligned with interagency and international efforts that are underway (e.g. GOESS, IOOS). To ensure that NOAA's efforts in this arena are responsive to users, NOAA is being actively informed and guided by its Science Advisory Board's Data Archive and Access Requirements Working Group and is also working to address many of the principles and guidelines proposed in the National Research Council report titled: Environmental Data Management At NOAA. This presentation will: 1) summarize community's need for improved data management services, 2) provide an overview of the Global Earth Observation – Integrated Data Environment (GEO-IDE) initiative, 3) highlight some of the specific efforts that are underway at NOAA and 4) describe possible future environmental information management activities of interest to science users.
IN11D-05
Building RAMADDA, (Repository for Archiving, Managing and Accessing Diverse DAta), a Framework for Data Access, Management, Discovery, and Visualization
The Repository for Archiving, Managing and Accessing Diverse DAta (RAMADDA), is a web based
application that provides a myriad of services for data access, subsetting, and visualization. RAMADDA
accomodates many ways to populate its database with meta-data, data, and products. RAMADDA provides a
myriad of services including, OPeNDAP, THREDDS, and RSS and can be extended to offer other services.
RAMADDA is data agnostic, although created with earth system science in mind, it can handle any data type.
Some services are data-centric, but the development of RAMADDA allows other users to provide other types
of data handlers or services.
RAMADDA is also closely integrated with Unidata's freely available 3D visualization client, the Integrated Data
Viewer (IDV). One can directly access the data via the IDV and publish content directly back to the
RAMADDA, allowing ease in navigating the full cycle of data use: discovery, access, 3D visualization, and
publication back to RAMADDA. These capabilities lend themselves well to educational and research
environments, and also facilitate collaboration.
http://www.unidata.ucar.edu
IN11D-06
DataSite: A Data Processing System For Research Sites
DataSite is an object-oriented system for organizing and processing data and metadata from and about meteorological/hydrological research stations. Site data, typically records with multiple columns, are stored initially as timeseries objects in native datalogger or other source formats, then are split by column and stored as separate objects representing sensor and other values. Object methods, ordinary executables which may be written in any language, provide for access and processing of stored data objects either directly or through abstract views combining several objects.
IN11D-07
Operational Interoperable Web Coverage Service for Earth Observing Satellite Data: Issues and Lessons Learned
In the past few years, there have been growing interests, among major earth observing satellite (EOS) data providers, in serving data through the interoperable Web Coverage Service (WCS) interface protocol, developed by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). The interface protocol defined in WCS specifications allows client software to make customized requests of multi-dimensional EOS data, including spatial and temporal subsetting, resampling and interpolation, and coordinate reference system (CRS) transformation. A WCS server describes an offered coverage, i.e., a data product, through a response to a client's DescribeCoverage request. The description includes the offered coverage's spatial/temporal extents and resolutions, supported CRSs, supported interpolation methods, and supported encoding formats. Based on such information, a client can request the entire or a subset of coverage in any spatial/temporal resolutions and in any one of the supported CRSs, formats, and interpolation methods. When implementing a WCS server, a data provider has different approaches to present its data holdings to clients. One of the most straightforward, and commonly used, approaches is to offer individual physical data files as separate coverages. Such implementation, however, will result in too many offered coverages for large data holdings and it also cannot fully present the relationship among different, but spatially and/or temporally associated, data files. It is desirable to disconnect offered coverages from physical data files so that the former is more coherent, especially in spatial and temporal domains. Therefore, some servers offer one single coverage for a set of spatially coregistered time series data files such as a daily global precipitation coverage linked to many global single- day precipitation files; others offer one single coverage for multiple temporally coregistered files together forming a large spatial extent. In either case, a server needs to assemble an output coverage real-time by combining potentially large number of physical files, which can be operationally difficult. The task becomes more challenging if an offered coverage involves spatially and temporally un-registered physical files. In this presentation, we will discuss issues and lessons learned in providing NASA's AIRS Level 2 atmospheric products, which are in satellite swath CRS and in 6-minute segment granule files, as virtual global coverages. We"ll discuss the WCS server's on- the-fly georectification, mosaicking, quality screening, performance, and scalability.
IN11D-08
2D Maps, 3D Globes, and OGC Web Services Supporting Arctic Science through the Arctic Research Mapping Application (ARMAP)
The Arctic Research Mapping Application (ARMAP) is a suite of online services designed to provide support
for Arctic science. These services include: a text based online search utility, 2D Internet Map Server (IMS),
3D globe applications (Google Earth and ArcGIS Explorer), Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Web Map
Service (WMS) and Keyhole Markup Language (KML) Service , and a prototype 2D ArcGIS Server Web
Mapping Application (WMA). Avoiding a duplication of effort has been a primary objective of the ARMAP
project which incorporates best practices (e.g. OGC standard web services and metadata) and off the shelf
technologies. The Arctic Research Logistics Support Service (ARLSS) database is the foundation of all the
ARMAP services and includes US research funded by the National Science Foundation, National Aeronautics
and Space Administration and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. With ARMAP's 2D maps
and 3D globes, users can navigate to areas of interest, view a variety of map layers, and explore U.S.
federally funded research projects. Projects can be queried by location, year, funding program, discipline,
and keyword. Links to specific information and other web sites associated with particular research projects
are included. . The ARMAP suite provides tools for users of various levels of technical ability to interact with
data by running text based queries, browsing in 2D or 3D, or importing the KML and OGC web services
directly into their own GIS applications and virtual globes.
With special emphasis on the International Polar Year (IPY), ARMAP has targeted science planners,
scientists, educators, and the general public. In sum, ARMAP goes beyond a simple map display to enable
analysis, synthesis, and coordination of Arctic research. ARMAP may be accessed via the gateway web site
at http://www.armap.org.
http://www.armap.org