Ocean data from MODIS at the NASA Goddard Earth Sciences DAAC

The Goddard Earth Science (GES) Distributed Active Archive Center (DAAC) plays a major role in enabling basic scientific research and providing access to scientific data to the general use community through the ingest, processing, archive and distribution of Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectro radiometer (MODIS) data. The full suite of ocean products is archived at the NASA GES DAAC at a rate of about 230 Gigabytes (GB)/day. A significant increase in the volume of ocean data being ingested, archived and distributed at the GES DAAC will occur when the data from the MODIS instrument onboard the Aqua (formally PM-I) spacecraft begins transmission. The challenge, to distribute such large volumes of data to the ocean community, is achieved through a combination of EOS Data Gateways, the GES DAAC Search and Order World Wide Web (WWW) interface, and an FTP site that contains samples of MODIS data.