Principal Investigator (PI): Edward Armstrong, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)

Many resources available for coastal ocean research and management remain underutilized. Typically, the emphasis in the past has been on increasing access and usability of remote sensing satellite products from NASA's Distributed Active Archive Centers (DAACs).

Significant progress has been made in this regard although access and discovery mechanisms still remain disjointed. Less attention has been paid to discovery and usability to ocean in situ records and circulation model products, because typically these are organized and maintained on a smaller regional level such as a university or smaller division of a larger national agency.

Thus, in many cases web services from these regional activities suffer from under-utilization. In this effort we will focus on improving discovery of these regional coastal ocean web services and data portals, including databases for satellite imagery, in situ and field measurements, and geographic information system (GIS) coverages as a few examples. In addition, we believe that ocean model product web services remain underutilized, including regional ocean models.

In the first phase of our effort we intend to build an online catalog of these resources that will allow users to quickly discover the availability of web services and data for their region of interest, physical parameter of interest or specific regional project of interest, or any combination of these. In the second phase of our effort we will integrate those services that allow callable data retrieval syntax such as Web Coverage Service (WCS)/Web Map Service (WMS), OPeNDAP, and JPL Datacasting into a client within the framework of the EASy GIS, the most advanced GIS for marine research and data products.

Currently it supports over 40 NASA remote sensing products and a growing list of in situ and ocean model products. Using a web interface (client) to the core software a user will be able to integrate, view, overlay and interrogate products that have been linked to our discovery catalog.