GOVERNMENT

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications will continue to help NASA manage the flood of data generated by the Earth Observing System thanks to a three-year $2.8 million grant from the national space agency. The Earth Observing System aims to improve understanding of the Earth as an environmental system, an effort that could lead to improved weather forecasts, tools for managing agriculture and forests, and a better understanding of global warming. EOS is composed of multiple satellites and remote sensors that monitor our planet’s land surface, biosphere, atmosphere, and oceans. This system generates a flood of data. Three terabytes of data must be collected, archived and distributed every day, and eventually EOS will include 15 petabytes of data. "EOS HDF data has been accessed worldwide by an estimated 1.6 million users, from scientists to farmers to schoolchildren,” says Mike Folk, technical program manager of the HDF group at NCSA. “We are excited by the challenge of meeting the needs of such a large and diverse assortment of people. We are especially gratified to be able to do our part to help understand global climate change." Since 1993, NASA has used NCSA’s Hierarchical Data Format (HDF) http://hdf.ncsa.uiuc.edu/ – a package of software, libraries, and tools for analyzing, visualizing, and converting scientific data -- as its standard for EOS data. HDF is an important component in this massive sharing of scientific data because it allows users to move and share data regardless of the computing platform they use. HDF can handle visual, as well as numerical, data and allows scientists to include peripheral information about the data in their datasets. Within HDF files, data can be organized in ways that suit the needs of those who access it. NCSA’s HDF team has developed a version of HDF, called HDF-EOS http://hdfeos.gsfc.nasa.gov/hdfeos/index.cfm , that is tailor-made for the data generated by NASA’s satellites and instruments.