Newswise — Every day, 14 times a day, untold bits of data have been raining down from satellites circling the planet. It has been that way for more than 25 years.
One such dataset closely monitors the planet's weather conditions. Sea surface temperatures, wind, air temperature, atmospheric water vapor, cloud water and rainfall rates are measured, collected and transmitted to an Earth-receiving station.
Scientists face the challenge of how to make this data useful and easy to access. That was the genesis of DISCOVER — the Distributed Information Services for Climate and Ocean products and Visualizations for Earth Research.
"The focus of this research project is to provide highly accurate, long-term data retrieval that could meet the most demanding research requirements with easy-to-use data access, analysis, and display tools," said Dr. Sara Graves, Director of the Information Technology Research Center at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH). "This research will provide new and innovative methods for enabling research in climate change."
DISCOVER is the collaborative effort of UAH, the California-based company Remote Sensing Systems, and NASA Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC). UAH and NASA researchers, located at the National Science and Technology Center (NSSTC) at UAH, work closely together on DISCOVER and other projects at the Global Hydrology Resource Center. The GHRC, which serves as the data management and user services arm of the Global Hydrology and Climate Center at the NSSTC, provides historical and current Earth science data, information, and products from satellite, airborne, and surface-based instruments.
Researchers at UAH are taking the lead in exploring new technologies and approaches for managing repositories of scientific data with the following goals for the project:
* Provide online services to access the data as well as to provide visualization models, * Improve interoperability technologies to enhance the ability to use the dataset, * Develop a flexible architecture to adapt to changing needs and requirements of users, and * Integrate the repository into the DISCOVER system.
"One of the most important aspects of DISCOVER is the online availability of large volumes of DISCOVER products, along with specialized tools and services that enable users to access and use data more effectively," according to Helen Conover, a research scientist working on DISCOVER. "These online repositories not only provide a large amount of data for users to retrieve, but also facilitate the use of applications capable of accessing data dynamically across the network."
The distributed services technology developed in DISCOVER will provide the capability to easily incorporate services and functionality developed by other Earth Science researchers or software developers. In addition to facilitating conventional data access and order mechanisms for the science user community, DISCOVER will also support emerging standards and provide new online services targeted at the educational community.
"This research is focused on developing a powerful service architecture for data processing, in order to improve performance, flexibility, and adaptability of data distribution and user tools," said UAH's Ken Keiser, a research scientist working on the project. "Technologies that are under development will allow users to 'mix and match' services through a variety of specialized applications that minimize the barriers to accessing the data and information, providing far greater capabilities than systems currently available."
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