Principal Investigator (PI): Michael Goodman, NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center

Current procedures for capturing and disseminating provenance, or data product lineage, are limited in both what is captured and how it is disseminated to the science community. This proposal brings together a team of NASA and university researchers with expertise in NASA Earth science data systems, science algorithm development, and provenance collection/dissemination. This team, led by Michael Goodman, Deputy Manager for the Earth Science Office at Marshall and manager of the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer-EOS Science Investigator-led Processing System (AMSR-E SIPS), proposes to apply a proven provenance tool to the generation of AMSR-E standard products, with an initial focus on sea ice products.

The team will utilize Karma, a provenance tool developed by Co-I Beth Plale at Indiana University. Karma is a provenance collection and representation tool designed and developed for data driven workflows such as those used to generate NASA standard products. Other team members include Dr. Thorsten Markus, Head of the Cryospheric Sciences Branch at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, member of the AMSR-E science team and responsible for the science algorithms used to generate the AMSR-E Sea Ice products; and Dr. Rahul Ramachandran and Helen Conover at University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH). Both have rich experience with metadata issues and Earth science software applications, and have been involved in NASA standards committees and working groups. This project will integrate Karma into the AMSR-E SIPS production environment.

The AMSR-E SIPS generates Level 2 and Level 3 data products from AMSR-E observations, which are key data sets for research in both the Climate Variability and Change and Water and Energy Cycle focus areas. An initial focus on Sea Ice processing will allow the project to engage the Sea Ice science team and user community in customizing Karma for NASA science data. Metadata gathered by Karma will be presented to the AMSR-E data community via an interactive web application.