NASA’s MEaSUREs Program Serving the Earth Science Community

Abstract:

A major need stated by the NASA Earth science research strategy is to develop long-term, consistent, and calibrated data and products that are valid across multiple missions and satellite sensors. NASA has invested in the creation of consistent time series satellite data sets over decades, through both mission science team-based and measurement-based data product reprocessing and through solicitations for merged data products. The NOAA/NASA Pathfinder Program, carried out in the mid-1990’s, resulted in the reprocessing of four long time-series datasets from existing archives. The Research, Education and Applications Solutions Network (REASoN) Program, initiated in 2002, consisted of several projects that provided data products, information systems and services capabilities, and/or advanced data systems technologies, to address strategic needs in Earth science research, applications, and education. The Program named Making Earth System data records for Use in Research for Earth Science, or MEaSUREs has had two requests for proposals, the first in 2006 and the second in 2012. With this Program, the Earth Science Division has focused on generating datasets for particular Earth science research measurement needs, and refers to such datasets as Earth System Data Records (ESDRs). Climate Data Records (CDRs) are a particular case of ESDRs. An ESDR is defined as a unified and coherent set of observations of a given parameter of the Earth system, which is optimized to meet specific requirements in addressing science questions.

Most of the MEaSUREs projects are five years long. They produce ESDRs using mature, peer-reviewed algorithms. The products are vetted by the user community in the respective scientific disciplines. They are made available publicly by the projects during their execution period. Before the projects end, the ESDRs are transferred to one of the NASA-assigned Distributed Active Archive Centers for longer-term archiving and distribution. Tens of millions of ESDR files have been distributed to tens of thousands of users over the last five years, and the activity is on-going. The scientific impact of the Program can be seen in the number of citations (e.g., 960 in Fiscal Year 2013) in peer-reviewed scientific literature referencing the MEaSUREs products or algorithm-related publications.