Principal Investigator (PI): Paul Houser , Institute of Global Environment and Society (IGES) Co-Investigator (Co-PI): Megan Larko, IGES

Water has long been known to be essential to human activity. Both plants and animals upon which humans depend, require water to survive. The ability to monitor and to study the amount and location of water is critical for the management of earth's resources.

To this end, metadata in NASA's Earth Observing System Clearinghouse (ECHO) is an essential information resource for connecting water users to the best available data. In response to NASA's ROSES A.19 Advancing Collaborative Connections for Earth System Science (ACCESS) call to enhance and improve existing components of the data and information systems infrastructure supporting NASA's Earth science research communities, we propose to develop a new Water and Energy Cycle (WEC) ECHO client (WECHO).

The purpose of this client is to use ECHO middleware technology to provide access to and discovery of data resources related to NASA's Global Water and Energy Cycle Focus Area (one of 6 such NASA research focus areas). Science and technology professionals will be able to access NASA data and services via a web-based tool tightly integrated with ECHO Application Program Interfaces (APIs) to combine and then display via the client web browser data sets and subsets within the realm of ECHOs' holdings. Our objective is to establish practical applications that benefit the research of the community of known science users and extend those benefits to society at-large.

Interfacing with the ECHO API, the users of this new ACCESS client will be able to browse NASA's water and energy cycle related holdings and then display characteristics of the data set(s). This new portal will incorporate statistical and quantitative graphics displays allowing the user to apply educated human insight and analysis in the formulation of new hypothesis and the validation of current theories. The portal will be based upon industry standards for performing web-based computing. The proposed portal will also offer some command-line based functionality for use in automating general tasks.