CO2 Virtual Science Data Environment: Providing Streamlined Access to CO2 Data

Abstract:

CO2 is an important greenhouse gas and therefore characterizing and understanding its global distribution is crucial for the study of Earth's changing climate. Currently, satellite remote sensing measurements of CO2 are available from the Greenhouse gases Observing SATellite (GOSAT), Atmospheric InfraRed Sounder (AIRS), Orbiting Carbon Observatory 2 (OCO-2), and Tropospheric Emission Spectrometer (TES). Traditionally, data from these different missions are distributed separately from one another and they each possess different data formats, making it cumbersome for researchers to access, analyze, and perform inter-comparison.

We present an effort at JPL to design a web-based science data environment (co2.jpl.nasa.gov) that allows users to access and utilize CO2 data from GOSAT, AIRS, OCO-2, TES, and the ground-based Total Carbon Column Observing Network (TCCON) in a single user-friendly interface. The features of the data environment include the ability to download full mission-specific CO2-related Level 2 data files or to customize them based on location, time, data variable, version, and format. An important feature of the JPL CO2 data environment is that it allows generation of customized Level 3 products and provides detailed documentation on the mission specifications along with technical data information. These tools are designed to allow users streamlined access to relevant remote sensing and ground-based CO2 datasets in order to facilitate research on atmospheric CO2.