Data Management Challenges for Airborne NASA Earth Ventures Sub-Orbital Investigations

The Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) Distributed Active Archive Center (DAAC) is developing technology infrastructure to archive airborne remote sensing observations from two of NASA’s Earth Venture Sub-orbital Missions.

The two missions are CARVE and AirMOSS. These missions collected over 140 TB of data from extensive ground-based and airborne instruments. The metadata and documentation requirements necessary for proper archive and dissemination of such transect-based, and often 3-dimensional, airborne data are quite different from traditional field campaign data and satellite remote sensing data streams. Staff at the ORNL DAAC have developed a metadata and data infrastructure for airborne data that enables spatial or keyword-based search and discovery, integration of related satellite- or ground-based data sets, and subsetting and visualization tools for both CARVE and AirMOSS. The CARVE and AirMOSS data will be available via http://daac.ornl.gov/ by September 2016.