No Pixel Left Behind - Peeling Away NASA's Satellite Swaths

Abstract:

Discovery and identification of Earth Science products should not be the majority effort of scientific research. Search aides based on text metadata go to great lengths to simplify this process. However, the process is still cumbersome and requires too much data download and analysis to down select to valid products. The EOSDIS Global Imagery Browse Services (GIBS) is attempting to improve this process by providing “visual metadata” in the form of full-resolution visualizations representing geophysical parameters taken directly fromt he data. Through the use of accompanying interpretive information such as color legends and the natural visual processing of the human eye, researchers are able to search and filter through data products in a more natural and efficient way.

The GIBS “visual metadata” products are generated as representations of Level 3 data or as temporal composites of the Level 2 granule- or swath-based data products projected across a geographic or polar region. Such an approach allows for low-latency tiled access to pre-generated imagery products. For many GIBS users, the resulting image suffices for a basic representation of the underlying data. However, composite imagery presents an insurmountable problem: for areas of spatial overlap within the composite, only one observation is visually represented. This is especially problematic in the polar regions where a significant portion of sensed data is “lost.”

In response to its user community, the GIBS team coordinated with its stakeholders to begin developing an approach to ensure that there is "no pixel left behind." In this presentation we will discuss the use cases and requirements guiding our efforts, considerations regarding standards compliance and interoperability, and near term goals. We will also discuss opportunities to actively engage with the GIBS team on this topic to continually improve our services.