NASA recently entered a new era in Earth exploration as near real-time data from the Tropical Rainfall Measurement Mission (TRMM) satellite became available on-line in June of this year.
Launched in November 1997, TRMM is a joint project between NASA
and Japan's National Space Development Agency (NASDA). The satellite
collects data related to tropical rainfall and other atmospheric
phenomena for use in weather forecasting, climatological studies, and
agricultural predictions.
TRMM is the first mission of NASA's Earth Science Enterprise
program that will be providing data to the public via the Internet
within 24-48 hours of its collection.
"TRMM represents a new way of doing business at NASA," said
Chris Kummerow, NASA's lead TRMM Project Scientist. "The satellite
is generating 30-40 GB of new remote sensing data per day.
"The initial access and analysis of TRMM data is not limited to a
small group of principal investigators, as has usually been the case,
but is available to anyone with an Internet connection. This
approach has the potential to stimulate Earth science research to new
levels."
TRMM is also the first satellite in the Earth Science Enterprise
program to distribute data in the Hierarchical Data Format (HDF), a
public data standard. HDF has been adopted by NASA for TRMM and
other Earth science missions to give scientists consistent access to
data.
"Most scientists currently spend a large portion of their time
accessing research data due to incompatible formats between software
and hardware platforms," stated Ted Meyer, ex-NASA official and now
CEO of Fortner Software.
"NASA has changed the landscape by providing data collections in
a single format, HDF. Using analysis tools fine- tuned to HDF, like
Fortner Software's Noesys application, researchers can quickly access
and better utilize the data. With NASA planning on providing
thousands of gigabytes of remote sensing data daily, the ability to
quickly analyze this data is crucial."
Fortner's Noesys software, available for Windows and Power
Macintosh, offers a low cost solution to access, manipulate, and
visualize science data in an easy-to-use environment.
With Noesys, data can be quickly scanned and verified, subsetted
to identify areas of interest, and visualized as graphs, images and
3D animations. Global data sets can be mapped to a variety of earth
projections and viewed at any angle.
Using Noesys and Earth science data such as TRMM, scientists are
able to analyze cloud patterns, detect fish concentrations in oceans,
analyze crop productivity, measure forest growth, study sea surface
temperatures related to El Nino, visualize ozone concentrations in
the upper atmosphere, and more.
Noesys desktop software lets anyone from academic researchers to
commercial organizations perform data analysis comparable to that of
leading scientists using high-end workstations.
