64 research outputs found
GHRC: NASAs Hazardous Weather Distributed Active Archive Center
No full textThe Global Hydrology Resource Center (GHRC; ghrc.nsstc.nasa.gov) is one of NASA's twelve Distributed Active Archive Centers responsible for providing access to NASA's Earth science data to users worldwide. Each of NASA's twelve DAACs focuses on a specific science discipline within Earth science, provides data stewardship services and supports its research community's needs. Established in 1991 as the Marshall Space Flight Center DAAC and renamed GHRC in 1997, the data center's original mission focused on the global hydrologic cycle. However, over the years, data holdings, tools and expertise of GHRC have gradually shifted. In 2014, a User Working Group (UWG) was established to review GHRC capabilities and provide recommendations to make GHRC more responsive to the research community's evolving needs. The UWG recommended an update to the GHRC mission, as well as a strategic plan to move in the new direction. After a careful and detailed analysis of GHRC's capabilities, research community needs and the existing data landscape, a new mission statement for GHRC has been crafted: to provide a comprehensive active archive of both data and knowledge augmentation services with a focus on hazardous weather, its governing dynamical and physical processes, and associated applications. Within this broad mandate, GHRC will focus on lightning, tropical cyclones and storm-induced hazards through integrated collections of satellite, airborne, and in-situ data sets. The new mission was adopted at the recent 2015 UWG meeting. GHRC will retain its current name until such time as it has built substantial data holdings aligned with the new mission
From Tape Reels to Global Access: A History and Future Vision of NASA's Scientific Data Management
No full textAbstract Since its creation in the late 1950s, NASA has collected space science data and information that span astrophysics, Earth science, planetary science, heliophysics, and biological and physical sciences. While these data were critical to NASA's objective of expanding human knowledge of space, the early days of scientific data and information management were characterized by a fragmented and under‐resourced approach. Information management practices typically lacked standardization, comprehensive archival routines, and adequate funding. This paper reviews NASA's scientific data management journey, from its early, inefficient stages to its current status as a widely adopted process focused on open access. By systematically reviewing a series of National Academy of Science reports and other relevant white papers from the early 1980s to the present, this study identifies common themes and persistent challenges related to the scientific data management lifecycle, data accessibility and reusability, advancing technology trends, and policy and collaboration. The paper highlights significant improvements in data management at NASA, including data standardization, infrastructure development, and the adoption of open data policies. Finally, the paper considers the future of scientific data management at NASA, emphasizing the need for holistic knowledge assimilation, faster integration processes, and the critical role of scientific data stewardship in the age of artificial intelligence
Mining Dark Information Resources to Develop New Informatics Capabilities to Support Science
No full textNo abstract availabl
Metadata Scoring through the Lens of the Common Framework for Earth-Observation Data
No full textThis presentation was given at the Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP) Winter Meeting held in Bethesda, MD in January 2020.</div
Making Connections: Where STEM Learning and Earth Science Data Services Meet
No full textSTEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) learning is most effective when students are encouraged to see the connections between science, technology and real world problems. Helping to make these connections has become an increasingly important aspect of Earth Science data research. The Global Hydrology Resource Center (GHRC), one of NASA's 12 EOSDIS (Earth Observing System Data Information System) data centers, has developed a new type of documentation called the micro article to facilitate making connections between data and Earth science research problems
Climate Data Initiative: A Geocuration Effort to Support Climate Resilience
No full textCuration is traditionally defined as the process of collecting and organizing information around a common subject matter or a topic of interest and typically occurs in museums, art galleries, and libraries. The task of organizing data around specific topics or themes is a vibrant and growing effort in the biological sciences but to date this effort has not been actively pursued in the Earth sciences. In this paper, we introduce the concept of geocuration and define it as the act of searching, selecting, and synthesizing Earth science data/metadata and information from across disciplines and repositories into a single, cohesive, and useful compendium We present the Climate Data Initiative (CDI) project as an exemplar example. The CDI project is a systematic effort to manually curate and share openly available climate data from various federal agencies. CDI is a broad multi-agency effort of the U.S. government and seeks to leverage the extensive existing federal climate-relevant data to stimulate innovation and private-sector entrepreneurship to support national climate-change preparedness. We describe the geocuration process used in CDI project, lessons learned, and suggestions to improve similar geocuration efforts in the future
Exploiting dark information resources to create new value added services to study Earth science phenomena
No full textThe art and science of data curation: Lessons learned from constructing a virtual collection
No full textClimate Impact and GIS Education Using Realistic Applications of Data.gov Thematic Datasets in a Structured Lesson-Based Workbook
No full textThis project created a workbook which teaches Earth Science to undergraduate and graduate students through guided in-class activities and take-home assignments organized around climate topics which use GIS to teach key geospatial analysis techniques and cartography skills. The workbook is structured to the White House's Data.gov climate change themes, which include Coastal Flooding, Ecosystem Vulnerability, Energy Infrastructure, Arctic, Food Resilience, Human Health, Transportation, Tribal Nations, and Water. Each theme provides access to framing questions, associated data, interactive tools, and further reading (e.g. The US Climate Resilience Toolkit and National Climate Assessment). Lessons make use of the respective theme's available resources. The structured thematic approach is designed to encourage independent exploration. The goal is to teach climate concepts and concerns, GIS techniques and approaches, and effective cartographic representation and communication results; and foster a greater awareness of publicly available resources and datasets. To reach more audiences more effectively, a two level approach was used. Level 1 serves as an introductory study and relies on only freely available interactive tools to reach audiences with fewer resources and less familiarity. Level 2 presents a more advanced case study, and focuses on supporting common commercially available tool use and real-world analysis techniques
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