2011 - Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences ...

Pichugina, YL, RM Banta, WA Brewer, SP Sandberg,
and RM Hardesty (2010), Wind flow characteristics from
ship-borne lidar measurements in support of wind energy
research, 19th Symposium on Boundary Layers and Turbulence,
August, Keystone, Colorado.
NGDC-01GeospacialTechnology
forGlobalIntegratedObservingand
DataManagementSystems
FEDERAL LEAD: RAY HABERMANN
CIRES LEAD: RICHARD FOZZARD
NOAA Goal 3: Weather and Water
Project Goal: Develop methods and processes for integrating
multiple types of observations (e.g., gridded satellite products, in
situ measurements) using new Geographic Information System
(GIS) data management and access tools; develop methods and
processes for partnering with scientists to facilitate interoperability
by producing metadata for scientific observations that are
compliant with national Federal Geographic Data Committee
(FGDC) and International Standards Organization (ISO) standards;
and create tools that allow the mining of vast environmental
archives for the purpose of knowledge extraction, data quality
control and trend detection.
Milestone 1. Design, develop and demonstrate systems to
support data set discovery, documentation, lineage and usage
(metadata) using international standards.
Current events such as the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill
and the political debate over climate change have dramatically
raised the visibility of NOAA data. While accurate,
well-structured documentation has always been important
to the usefulness of science data, Congress, reporters,
bloggers and the general public are now examining
data sets and asking how they were collected. NOAA’s
National Geophysical Data Center (NGDC) and CIRES
are spearheading the initiative to provide high-quality
metadata for hundreds of data sets across NOAA using
the ISO 19115-2 and related standards. We have developed
a collection of metadata authoring, archiving and access
tools known as the Enterprise Metadata System (EMS),
currently serving more than 40 Web Accessible Folders
and thousands of metadata records.
One component of the EMS is the ncISO software, which
automates the generation of ISO metadata for netCDF
(Network Common Data Form) files. NetCDF is a common
file format within the atmospheric and oceanographic
scientific communities. By collaborating with Unidata,
NGDC and CIRES were able to embed ncISO within
THREDDS (Thematic Realtime Environmental Distributed
Data Services) software, greatly increasing the amount of
documentation available using ISO standards.
Product: http://www.ioos.gov/catalog/
Milestone 2. Design, develop and demonstrate systems that
provide integrated access to and visualization of in situ and
satellite environmental observations. Employ Open Geospatial
Consortium (OGC) standards, as well as emerging
international approaches, to ensure interoperability across
systems.
CIRES staff at the NGDC have extensively improved
86 CIRES Annual Report 2011
Figure1: The Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS) Catalog uses
ISO metadata and Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) services to
provide a centralized gateway for the discovery of ocean observationbased
data sets.
Figure2: NOAA’s Observing Systems Architecture Google Map providing
metadata for a station in the NOAA’s Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric
Research Aerosol Observing System.
NOAA’s Observing Systems Architecture (NOSA) documentation
for more than 100 separate data sets, while
converting from FGDC metadata standard to ISO 19115-2.
We have developed systems to use that metadata to visualize
NOAA in situ environmental data sets. For example,
metadata is transformed dynamically into a KML file and
presented in a Google Map or in Google Earth.
Product: http://www.nosa.noaa.gov/google_earth.html
Milestone 3. Design, develop and demonstrate systems to
support in situ and satellite data set ingest, archival and data
quality monitoring.
CIRES staff at the NGDC developed a tape archive
retrieval system for NGDC’s 800 terabyte science data
holdings. This prioritizes and tracks orders; verifies
requested files against the archive inventory, size and
security limits; packages results; and notifies users when
an order is complete. An initial prototype of a web service
providing controlled access to the archive was completed
in December 2010, and a revision in the Grails database is
now nearly complete.
We have created a file inventory pipeline project to inventory
Space Weather satellite data files for the Solar-Ter-