Data Management Challenges for Airborne NASA Earth Venture Sub-Orbital Investigations

Abstract:

The Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) Distributed Active Archive Center (DAAC) is developing technology infrastructure to archive airborne remote sensing observations from two of NASA’s Earth Venture Sub-orbital Missions. The two missions are CARVE (Carbon in Arctic Reservoirs Vulnerability Experiment) and AirMOSS (Airborne Microwave Observatory of Subcanopy and Subsurface). These missions collected 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 traditional field campaign data and satellite remote sensing data streams. Staff at the ORNL DAAC have developed a metadata and data infrastructure for airborne data that enables spatial or keyword-based search and discovery, integration of related satellite- or ground-based data sets, and subsetting and visualization tools for both CARVE and AirMOSS. Here we discuss challenges, progress, and lessons learned.