Principal Investigator (PI): Milt Halem, University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC)

The objective of this proposal is to prototype a scalable web service tool that can provide atmospheric radiance gridding services on-demand over the internet from any of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) operational and NASA/Earth Observing Systems (EOS) polar-orbiting temperature sounding instruments. This tool will serve as the network interface for transforming user requests for an arbitrary spatial temporal spectral gridded atmospheric radiance data set from instruments on one or more satellites into an action to invoke a gridding process from a set of scientifically validated application programs.

The invoked web service agents will access, subset, concatenate, perform simple statistical and physically based gridding operations and present the data as level 3 gridded fields for analysis and visualization in multiple formats. Examples of possible gridding services to be offered in this proposal consist of selecting spectral radiances from one or more instruments for a specified spatial or temporal grid resolution for the following operations: spot averaging accounting for the instrument field of view response function, first footprint in grid bin, selecting radiances with a min/max brightness temperatures, ratios of spectral channels, filtering, convolving high resolution spectral radiances to match broader band spectral radiances, highly accurate limb adjustments, aligning spectral footprints falling inside spot of spectral channel from other instruments, calculating variances of radiances in grid box and creating visual displays of these fields.

The first year focus of this proposal will be two-fold. One effort will consist of preprocessing a one year global 1/2 degree by 2 degree core gridded data set for on-line storage of all the level 1b spectral radiances from NASA's Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS)/Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit (AMSU) instruments on Aqua and a second effort to grid and display the simultaneous level 1b data sets for the NASA AIRS/AMSU and Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) temperature sounding spectral radiances. The purpose of the core data set is to enable near real time on demand access for producing regional and global gridded supersets derived from this core data set. The second effort will demonstrate the ability to locate, access, subset and grid radiance data from the complete archive of level 1b data granules from NASA's Distributed Active Archive Center (DAAC) data pools as well as their deeper data tape archives. The system will queue the work flow requests and stages of processing in a data base and notify the users when the requests are completed.

The gridded web services tool will have both a manual input through a GUI as well as a direct computer request for a gridded data set.

Client users will select specific spectral channels of the different sensors, spatial and temporal radiance averaging intervals, the duration of the data record, grid domains, binning schemes, and the format desired for downloading or displaying these requests. Subsequent efforts in the second year will extend both efforts. The core global data sets will be extended to a five-year 1/4-degree by 1-degree on-line global gridded data set for the EOS and NOAA sounder instruments for on-demand supersetting. The gridding web service tool will be documented and ported to the DAAC and to the science teams to demonstrate the feasibility to support global and regional on demand grid requests of atmospheric radiances from level 1b near line tape archives and on line data pools. If approved for a third year, a five year AIRS/AMSU and MODIS core data set of 1/4 / deg by 1/2 degree will also be provided for supersetting.

On-Demand Multi-Sensor Web Services site coming soon.

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