Using Google Earth to Expose the Data Products of the North American Carbon Program
Peter
Griffith, NASA GSFC/ SSAI, peter.c.griffith@nasa.gov
(Presenting)
Lisa
Wilcox, NASA GSFC/ SSAI, lisa.e.wilcox@nasa.gov
Amy
Morrell, NASA GSFC/ SSAI, amy.l.morrell@nasa.gov
The central objective of the North American Carbon Program (NACP), a core element of the US Climate Change Science Program, is to quantify the sources and sinks of carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, and methane in North America and adjacent ocean regions. The NACP consists of a wide range of investigators at universities and federal research centers. Although many of these investigators have worked together in the past, many have had few prior interactions and may not know of similar work within knowledge domains, much less across the diversity of environments and scientific approaches in the Program.
Coordinating interactions and sharing data are major challenges in conducting NACP. A centralized NACP data management system was discussed during the planning stages of NACP, and a generalized concept was developed, but funding never materialized for this approach. Consequently, we have undertaken to identify data management resources that can be leveraged through the NACP website towards this end.
The NACP website (www.nacarbon.org) provides metadata describing each core and affiliated NACP project. These project-oriented metadata, or “project profiles”, store information such as a project's title, leaders, participants, an abstract, keywords, funding agencies, associated intensive field campaigns, expected data products, data needs, publications, and URLs to associated data centers, datasets, and metadata. Data products are identified to the site level whenever possible to allow search and discovery through Google Earth and Google Map, and include biometric inventories, flux tower estimates, remote sensing land cover products, tools, services, and model inputs / outputs. Because this information is easily and publicly available, the NACP Project profiles provide a greater understanding of the scientific and social context of each dataset and are an important means of communicating within the NACP and to the larger carbon cycle science community.
NASA Carbon Cycle & Ecosystems Active Awards Represented by this Poster: