Data Management Challenges for Airborne NASA Earth Venture Sub-Orbital (EVS-1) Investigations

Abstract:

The ORNL DAAC is developing a technology infrastructure to archive airborne remote sensing observations from two Earth System Science Pathfinder Missions. The two missions are CARVE: Carbon in Arctic Reservoirs Vulnerability Experiment and AirMOSS: Airborne Microwave Observatory of Subcanopy and Subsurface. The two missions are collecting over 140 TB of data from extensive ground-based and airborne instruments. The metadata and documentation requirements necessary for proper archive and dissemination of such transect-based, and often 3-dimensional, airborne data are quite different from the traditional field campaign and satellite remote sensing data streams. Staff at the ORNL DAAC are currently working with the CARVE and AirMOSS teams as well as investigating cyberinfrastructures from other DAACs to develop a metadata and data infrastructure for airborne data that will enable spatial, flight-line, or keyword-based search and discovery, integration as needed of related satellite- and ground-based data sets, and subsetting and visualization tools for both CARVE and AirMOSS. We discuss challenges, progress, and lessons learned.