nasa agency portfolio update for ipy stg

SCIENCE MISSION DIRECTORATE

NASA Agency Portfolio Update for IPY STG

Francis Lindsay, PhDEarth Science Division

Science Mission Directorate

NASA Headquarters


Relevant NASA/IPY Research and Data System Activities (1)

• Cyrospheric Science 07 (Closed 8-16-07) NASA's Earth Science Research Program places emphasis on the productive interaction between activities related to observations, modeling, and to field campaigns, including those funded under the International Polar Year (IPY).– An additional ice sheet modeling underway through NASA’s modeling

program - Don Anderson.• NASA’s ACCESS Solicitation - focuses on the access and use of key

environmental data. – DADDI/CSU awarded in 2005 as a focal project for an IPY data portal. – An additional project 2007 to support Greenland research with easy access to

data from MODIS and AVHRR, AMSR-E and SSM/I, GLAS and ATM, CERES, and QuikSCAT.

– Other data technologies are being funded with clear applicability to IPY (RSS, subsetting services, etc.).

• Decadal Survey Initial Science Panels Held (first 4 missions) - CLARREO, SMAP, ICESat-II, and DESDynI. Reports from these science meetings are forthcoming.



• Landsat Image Mosaic of Antarctica (LIMA) - USGS/NASA/NSF/BAS– The map provides a realistic look at the continent in 10 times

greater detail than ever before and offers the most geographically accurate, true-color and high-resolution views of the continent possible.

– The mosaic is made up of 1,100 Landsat 7 images, captured between 1999 and 2001. The masaic contains virtually no gaps in the landscape, other than an area at the South Pole, and shows virtually no seams between images.

– The Landsat Image Mosaic of Antarctica is now available in multiple formats on the Web at: http://lima.usgs.gov/



• Pine Island Glacier Project - NASA/NSF– Pine Island is a highly interesting area in Antarctica where rapid

changes in glacial ice need to be studied.– The project is a combined satellite and ground campaign effort. Data

collection will also involve extensive aircraft acquisitions.– Data collected from this effort will be made available for research and

to the general public.

NASA contact for Pine Island Project:Seelye Martin,NASA HQ


Relevant NASA/IPY Research and Data System Activities (Metadata and Data Discovery for IPY)

• Global Change Master Directory (GCMD) (http://gcmd.nasa.gov)– Provides a catalog ad portal for data discovery of NASA and other publicly

available environmental data and services.– The GCMD is working with IPY and has established a dedicated IPY data portal.

This portal has instances of metadata specific to IPY research and geographic areas of interest.

– Continued coordination with other IPY data portals is necessary to leverage the services that GCMD can provide.

– … the STG is a consistent approach to providing the polar remote sensing data. … perhaps provide simple metadata sharing, which could be through the GCMD (or DADDI) (M. Parsons)

• ECHO (EOS Clearing House)– Provides a data granule-level metadata for all NASA EOS data.– ECHO enables common searches of IPY relevant data across all NASA on-line

data access systems.– XML-based structure allows more easy mapping between differing metadata

formats.


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- Over 17,000 metadata records- Over 1,000 worldwide data providers- Average 5 million visits per month

http://gcmd.nasa.gov/


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NASA Earth Science Interoperable Data Architecture


Relevant NASA/IPY Ongoing Issues/Feedback to STG

• RADARSAT 1 MOU Continuation - CSA, NASA, NOAA0 is only through March 2008 (RADRSAT-2 becomes operational). NASA has no plans to purchase RADRSAT-2 data.

• ALOS through TDRS Project - NASA/JAXA – An experimental test to take place in late May 2008.– The PALSAR is the instrument of specific NASA interest.– This is Ka-band downlink, now ALOS only uses the one JAXA DRTS. Using ground

stations via X-band, the data is at 1/2 the bit rate, so either lower resolution or 1/2 swath.

– If the test project is successful, there will be a “political decision point” of NASA and JAXA on whether and what kind of operations using TDRS we would like to agree to.

– Craig Dobson is the HQ POC, (Seelye Martin a good person at HQ for IPY), for them to send wish-list type ideas for PALSAR to.

nasa agency portfolio update for ipy stg

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