Optimal Reorganization of NASA Earth Science Data for Enhanced Accessibility and Usability for the Hydrology Community

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• 作者：William Teng ; Hualan Rui ; Richard Strub and Bruce Vollmer
• 刊名：JAWRA Journal of the American Water Resources Association
• 出版年：2016
• 出版时间：August 2016
• 年：2016
• 卷：52
• 期：4
• 页码：825-835
• 全文大小：1606K
• ISSN：1752-1688

文摘

A long-standing “Digital Divide” in data representation exists between the preferred way of data access by the hydrology community and the common way of data archival by earth science data centers. Typically, in hydrology, earth surface features are expressed as discrete spatial objects (e.g., watersheds), and time-varying data are contained in associated time series. Data in earth science archives, although stored as discrete values (of satellite swath pixels or geographical grids), represent continuous spatial fields, one file per time step. This Divide has been an obstacle, specifically, between the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc. and NASA earth science data systems. In essence, the way data are archived is conceptually orthogonal to the desired method of access. Our recent work has shown an optimal method of bridging the Divide, by enabling operational access to long-time series (e.g., 36 years of hourly data) of selected NASA datasets. These time series, which we have termed “data rods,” are pre-generated or generated on-the-fly. This optimal solution was arrived at after extensive investigations of various approaches, including one based on “data curtains.” The on-the-fly generation of data rods uses “data cubes,” NASA Giovanni, and parallel processing. The optimal reorganization of NASA earth science data has significantly enhanced the access to and use of the data for the hydrology user community.