The seasonal to interannual Earth Science Information Partner: a distributed data and information broker

A consortium of three main sites consisting of the Center for Earth Observing and Space Research (CEOSR) at George Mason University (GMU), the Center for Ocean-Land-Atmosphere Studies (COLA) and the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Distributed Active Archive Center (GDAAC) has been formed. This consortium was recently funded by NASA's Earth Science Information Partner program to provide data and information products serving the needs of seasonal to interannual (S-I) scientists and other related science communities. Specifically, CEOSR will provide information technology and a distributed system architecture as wall as specific data products to be accessed by the scientific communities, COLA will provide scientific direction and a widely-used tool in the S-I research communities and GDAAC data management and archiving. Along with several other contributors, our consortium will create an interdisciplinary source of data for S-I researchers to expand the usage and usefulness of NASA data and serve as broker on behalf of the S-I researchers by providing them enhanced access to NASA's data. The consortium under guidance by an advisory board of experts will select the most appropriate data from the DAAC, NOAA, COLA and the University of Delaware for S-I research applications. Metadata and summary statistics will be extracted and stored in databases at distributed nodes, while the data will be stored on an advanced array of disks. There will be a JAVA-based WWW user interface featuring three advances: (1) content-based searching of the summary metadata (2) exploratory analysis of on-line data and (3) phenomenon-based searching. The consortium will be responsive to the changing needs of its science users as well as in tune with significant information technology advances.