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At least 1,045 records · Page 58

Automating the Processing of Earth Observation Data

NASA s vision for Earth science is to build a "sensor web": an adaptive array of heterogeneous satellites and other sensors that will track important events, such as storms, and provide real-time information about the state of the Earth to a wide variety of customers. Achieving this vision will require automation not only in the scheduling of the observations but also in the processing of the resulting data. To address this need, we are developing a planner-based agent to automatically generate and execute data-flow programs to produce the requested data products.

Golden, Keith↗

Automated Data Processing as an AI Planning Problem

NASA s vision for Earth Science is to build a "sensor web"; an adaptive array of heterogeneous satellites and other sensors that will track important events, such as storms, and provide real-time information about the state of the Earth to a wide variety of customers. Achieving his vision will require automation not only in the scheduling of the observations but also in the processing af tee resulting data. Ta address this need, we have developed a planner-based agent to automatically generate and execute data-flow programs to produce the requested data products. Data processing domains are substantially different from other planning domains that have been explored, and this has led us to substantially different choices in terms of representation and algorithms. We discuss some of these differences and discuss the approach we have adopted.

Golden, Keith↗

The Earth Science Afternoon Constellation Contingency Procedures

The Earth Science Afternoon Constellation comprises NASA missions Aqua, Aura, CloudSat and the Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO), the joint NASA/CNES mission CALIPSO and the CNES mission PARASOL. Both NASA and CNES offices are responsible for ensuring that contingency plans or other arrangements exist to cope with contingencies within their respective jurisdictions until the conclusion of all Afternoon Constellation operations. The Mission Operations Working Group, comprised of members from each of the missions, has developed the high-level procedures for maintaining the safety of this constellation. Each contingency situation requires detailed analyses before any decisions are made. This paper describes these procedures, and includes defining what constitutes a contingency situation, the pertinent parameters involved in the contingency analysis and guidelines for the actions required, based on the results of the contingency analyses.

Case, Warren F.↗

Solar Electric Propulsion

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration's New Millennium Program (NMP) is a space flight technology demonstration program that will validate the technologies needed to carry out the Earth and space science missions NASA envisions for the 21(sup st) century. The program is employing an innovative decision-making process to select the specific technologies that will be flight validated. First, NMP has articulated NASA's vision of science exploration for the next century, then it has defined the capabilities needed to execute that vision, and finally it will select and demonstrate the revolutionary technologies that provide those capabilities, thus enabling the science vision.

New Millennium New Millennium Program NMP space fl↗

The Orbiting Carbon Observatory mission

The Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO) mission was selected by NASA's Office of Earth Science as the fifth mission in its Earth System Science Pathfinder (ESSP) Program. OCO will make the first global, space-based measurements of atmospheric CO2 with the precision, resolution, and coverage needed to characterize sources and sinks of this important greenhouse gas. These measurements will improve our ability to forecasts CO2-induced climate change. OCO will fly in a 1:15 PM sun-synchronous orbit, sharing its ground track with the Earth Observing System (EOS) Aqua platform. It will carry high-resolution spectrometers to measure reflected sunlight in the molecular oxygen (O2) A-band at 0.76-microns and the CO2 bands at 1.61 and 2.06 microns to retrieve the column-averaged CO2 dry air mole fraction, XCO2. A comprehensive validation and correlative measurement program has been incorporated into this mission to ensure that XCO2 can be retrieved with precisions of 0.3% (1 ppm) on regional scales.

atmospheric chemistry↗

Remote Versus Local Forcing of Chlorophyll Variability in the South Atlantic Bight

This TM documents results of analyses addressing the local versus remote forcing of chlorophyll variability on the shelf and slope regions of the South Atlantic Bight (SAB) based on satellite-derived products and a limited amount of in situ data. This study is part of a larger multi-disciplinary, multi-institutional effort to study the Eastern U.S. Continental Shelf carbon budget (U.S. Eastern Continental Shelf Carbon Budget: Modeling, Data Assimilation, and Analysis, U.S. ECoS), a project funded by the NASA Earth System Enterprise Interdisciplinary Science Program that started in the summer of 2004.

Signorini, Sergio R.↗

A Second Generation Multi-Angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer (MISR-2)

The Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer (MISR) has been in Earth orbit since December 1999 on NASA's Terra spacecraft. This instrument provides new ways of looking at the Earth's atmosphere, clouds, and surface for the purpose of understanding the Earth's ecology, environment, and climate. To facilitate the potential future continuation of MISR's multi-angle observations, a study was undertaken in 1999 and 2000 under the Instrument Incubator Program (IIP) of NASA Code Y's Earth Science Technology Office (ESTO) to investigate and demonstrate the feasibility of a successor to MISR that will have greatly reduced size and mass. The kernel of the program was the design, construction, and testing of a highly miniaturized camera, one of the nine that would probably be used on a future space borne MISR-like instrument. This demonstrated that the size and mass reduction of the optical system and camera electronics are possible and that filters can be assembled to meet the miniaturized packaging requirements. An innovative, reflective optics design was used, enabling the wavelength range to be extended into the shortwave infrared. This was the smallest all-reflective camera ever produced by the contractor. A study was undertaken to determine the feasibility of implementing nine (multi-angle) cameras within a single structure. This resulted in several possible configurations. It would also be possible to incorporate one of the cameras into an airborne instrument.

spectroradiometers↗

NASA New Millennium Program Overview

This viewgraph presentation reviews the New Millennium Program (NMP) which was established in 1994 to revolutionize NASA's Space and Earth science programs to achieve more capable, less costly missions in th e 2lst Century by: 1. Developing and flight-validating revolutionary technologies; 2. Reducing development times and life cycle missi0n cost; 3. Enabling highly autonomous spacecraft and 4. Promoting nat ionwide teaming and coordination

cost effective↗

An Overview of the NASA Spring/Summer 2008 Arctic Campaign - ARCTAS (Arctic Research of the Composition of the Troposphere from Aircraft and Satellites)

ARCTAS (Arctic Research of the Composition of the Troposphere from Aircraft and Satellites) is a major NASA led airborne field campaign being performed in the spring and summer of 2008 at high latitudes (http://cloud1.arc.nasa.gov/arctas/). ARCTAS is a part of the International Polar Year program and its activities are closely coordinated with multiple U. S. (NOAA, DOE), Canadian, and European partners. Observational data from an ensemble of aircraft, surface, and satellite sensors are closely integrated with models of atmospheric chemistry and transport in this experiment. Principal NASA airborne platforms include a DC-8 for detailed atmospheric composition studies, a P-3 that focuses on aerosols and radiation, and a B-200 that is dedicated to remote sensing of aerosols. Satellite validation is a central activity in all these platforms and is mainly focused on CALIPSO, Aura, and Aqua satellites. Major ARCTAS themes are: (1) Long-range transport of pollution to the Arctic including arctic haze, tropospheric ozone, and persistent pollutants such as mercury; (2) Boreal forest fires and their implications for atmospheric composition and climate; (3) Aerosol radiative forcing from arctic haze, boreal fires, surface-deposited black carbon, and other perturbations; and (4) Chemical processes with focus on ozone, aerosols, mercury, and halogens. The spring deployment (April) is presently underway and is targeting plumes of anthropogenic and biomass burning pollution and dust from Asia and North America, arctic haze, stratosphere-troposphere exchange, and ozone photochemistry involving HOx and halogen radicals. The summer deployment (July) will target boreal forest fires and summertime photochemistry. The ARCTAS mission is providing a critical link to enhance the value of NASA satellite observations for Earth science. In this talk we will discuss the implementation of this campaign and some preliminary results.

Jacob, Daniel J.↗

Online Time Series Analysis of Land Products over Asia Monsoon Region via Giovanni

Time series analysis is critical to the study of land cover/land use changes and climate. Time series studies at local-to-regional scales require higher spatial resolution, such as 1km or less, data. MODIS land products of 250m to 1km resolution enable such studies. However, such MODIS land data files are distributed in 10ox10o tiles, due to large data volumes. Conducting a time series study requires downloading all tiles that include the study area for the time period of interest, and mosaicking the tiles spatially. This can be an extremely time-consuming process. In support of the Monsoon Asia Integrated Regional Study (MAIRS) program, NASA GES DISC (Goddard Earth Sciences Data and Information Services Center) has processed MODIS land products at 1 km resolution over the Asia monsoon region (0o-60oN, 60o-150oE) with a common data structure and format. The processed data have been integrated into the Giovanni system (Goddard Interactive Online Visualization ANd aNalysis Infrastructure) that enables users to explore, analyze, and download data over an area and time period of interest easily. Currently, the following regional MODIS land products are available in Giovanni: 8-day 1km land surface temperature and active fire, monthly 1km vegetation index, and yearly 0.05o, 500m land cover types. More data will be added in the near future. By combining atmospheric and oceanic data products in the Giovanni system, it is possible to do further analyses of environmental and climate changes associated with the land, ocean, and atmosphere. This presentation demonstrates exploring land products in the Giovanni system with sample case scenarios.

Shen, Suhung↗

Intelligent Observation Strategies for Geosynchronous Remote Sensing for Natural Hazards

Geosynchronous satellites offer a unique perspective for monitoring environmental factors important to understanding natural hazards and supporting the disasters management life cycle, namely forecast, detection, response, recovery and mitigation. In the NASA decadal survey for Earth science, the GEO-CAPE mission was proposed to address coastal and air pollution events in geosynchronous orbit, complementing similar initiatives in Asia by the South Koreans and by ESA in Europe, thereby covering the northern hemisphere. In addition to analyzing the challenges of identifying instrument capabilities to meet the science requirements, and the implications of hosting the instrument payloads on commercial geosynchronous satellites, the GEO-CAPE mission design team conducted a short study to explore strategies to optimize the science return for the coastal imaging instrument. The study focused on intelligent scheduling strategies that took into account cloud avoidance techniques as well as onboard processing methods to reduce the data storage and transmission loads. This paper expands the findings of that study to address the use of intelligent scheduling techniques and near-real time data product acquisition of both the coastal water and air pollution events. The topics include the use of onboard processing to refine and execute schedules, to detect cloud contamination in observations, and to reduce data handling operations. Analysis of state of the art flight computing capabilities will be presented, along with an assessment of cloud detection algorithms and their performance characteristics. Tools developed to illustrate operational concepts will be described, including their applicability to environmental monitoring domains with an eye to the future. In the geostationary configuration, the payload becomes a networked thing with enough connectivity to exchange data seamlessly with users. This allows the full field of view to be sensed at very high rate under the control of ground infrastructure, resulting in improved efficiencies, accuracy and science benefits. Hence a remote sensing payload and its data may become one of millions of connected objects in the emerging Internet of Things (IoT), and be as easily accessible by a users smart phone as any other smart appliance.

Analyzing and Visualizing Precipitation and Soil Moisture in ArcGIS

Precipitation and soil moisture are among the most important parameters in many land GIS (Geographic Information System) research and applications. These data are available globally from NASA GES DISC (Goddard Earth Science Data and Information Services Center) in GIS-ready format at 10-kilometer spatial resolution and 24-hour or less temporal resolutions. In this presentation, well demonstrate how rainfall and soil moisture data are used in ArcGIS to analyze and visualize spatiotemporal patterns of droughts and their impacts on natural vegetation and agriculture in different parts of the world.

precipitation↗

Efficiently Serving HDF5 Products via OPeNDAP

Hyrax OPeNDAP services are widely used by the Earth Science data centers in NASA, NOAA and other organizations to serve end users. In this talk, we will present some key features added in the HDF5 Hyrax OPeNDAP handler that can help data centers to better serve the HDF5netCDF-4 data products. Among these new features, we will focus on the following:1.The DAP4 support 2.The memory cache and the disk cache support that can reduce the service access time 3.The enhancement that makes the swath-like HDF5 products visualized by CF-client tools. We will also discuss the role of the HDF5 handler in-depth in the recent study of the Hyrax service in the cloud environment.

DAP4↗

NASA GIBS and Worldview: Leveraging Visualizations to Improve Data Discovery

NASA's Global Imagery Browse Services (GIBS) leverages scientific and community best practices and standards to provide a scalable, compliant, and authoritative source for NASA Earth Observing System (EOS) Earth science data visualizations. Since 2013, its goal has been to "transform how end users interact and discover [EOS] data through visualizations." Imagery layers within GIBS allow end users to easily and quickly interact with full resolution, pre-generated visualizations of scientific parameters. This interactive discovery approach relies on visual observation and identification of phenomena that are not as simply identified otherwise.

Global Imagery Browse Services↗

Evaluation of Matthews-WLR-CH4: A New Wetland, Lake, and Reservoir Methane Emissions Data Set

Methane (CH4) is emitted from a variety of sources, both natural and anthropogenic, and is the second most important greenhouse gas contributing to climate change. Natural wetlands are the largest single contributor to annual global CH4 emissions and other inland water sources, such as lakes and reservoirs, produce CH4 but have received less attention. These emission sources are among the most uncertain components of the global CH4 cycle. These uncertainties stem from numerous issues, including the vast variability in these ecosystems and the sensitivity of CH4 emissions to interannual climate variations. Existing CH4 emission models display large differences in wetland spatial extent and include simplified, or lack all together, wetland-type classifications. Furthermore, CH4 emissions from lakes and reservoirs are typically combined with wetlands, or ignored, on a regional and global scale. Our NASA Interdisciplinary Research in Earth Science (IDS) study is focused on developing a suite of data sets on wetlands, lakes, and reservoirs (WLR) including global distributions of types, CH4-centric classifications, and daily CH4 emission rates (hereafter Matthews-WLR-CH4). This project is unique in that it comprises source-independent emission data for WLR, the first spatially-explicit data set of lake and reservoir CH4 emissions, and wetland emissions comprising numerous different wetland-type classifications.The focus of this study is to perform the initial evaluation of the wetland and lake CH4 emissions data from Matthews-WLR-CH4. This evaluation will focus on the domain of North America and include: 1) estimates of the contribution of wetland and lake sources to total CH4 emissions and atmospheric mixing ratios, 2) comparisons of wetland fraction and CH4 emissions to a suite of existing models (e.g., Wetland and Wetland CH4 Inter-comparison of Models Project (WETCHIMP), Global Carbon Project (GCP)), and 3) an accuracy assessment with in situ airborne and tower-based atmospheric CH4 observations when the Matthews-WLR-CH4 emissions are implemented in forward and inverse CarbonTracker-Lagrange (CT-L) CH4 model simulations. Here we will present the new Matthews-WLR-CH4 wetland and lake CH4 emissions data, the initial evaluation of these products, and the path forward for our project.

Reservoir↗