Improved Open Data Sharing of NASA Airborne and Field Investigation Data

Abstract:

Airborne and field investigations are relatively short-term efforts designed to study specific science objectives, support the development of new instrumentation, and provide calibration and validation data for existing sensors and algorithms. These lesser-known data play an important role in NASA’s Earth observation system and Earth-focused research efforts. Airborne and field data are typically utilized by investigation science team members with few additional users after project conclusion. Improved data discoverability and access will facilitate the reuse of these data and enhance NASA’s return on investment. Historically, airborne data products have not been easy to locate and access, often stored on scientist’s hard drives or sitting on tapes in remote closets. Modern data requirements provide investigation data to data centers quickly with added metadata that allow for easier discovery. Effective discovery, access, and use of investigation data require accurate and ample metadata to describe the data and the context of the data collection. The Airborne Data Management Group (ADMG) has the primary responsibility of ensuring that NASA investigation data are discoverable and accessible to scientists and other interdisciplinary and applications-oriented data users. ADMG advises data center personnel and investigation science teams on best practices for airborne and field data management and provides training and assistance with data handling and metadata assignment. Data archive centers provide services to various communities with specialized needs, yet many researchers need data from multiple data centers. Improving the consistency in data archival, metadata assignment practices, and user services among the various data centers is vital to making these important NASA data open to all. This presentation outlines ADMG efforts to make investigation data open to more users. We will describe a new, carefully constructed airborne and field investigation inventory and a use-case database that has been developed to address challenges with and solutions to data discovery and access issues unique to airborne and field data. The ADMG also works to locate and bring important historical investigation data to data centers for open data access. Progress on this front will be shared in this talk.