Take the A-train

The NASA EOS A-Train is a constellation of five sun-synchronous orbiting satellites that are used by atmospheric scientists to monitor many of Earth's atmospheric radiances such as thermal energy, vegetation, topological structure, and many others. The satellites are: Aqua, CloudSat, CALIPSO, PARASOL, and Aura, and they receive the name “Afternoon Train” because they all cross the equator within a 15 minutes of each other at around 1:30pm local time on their ascending pass. These satellites orbit very close together in an attempt to collect consistent data by making all of the satellites observe nearly the same location at the same time, but without the complexity or launch risk of putting all of the instruments on the same platform. A-Train data is difficult to combine because data is not in any consistent format. Each satellite contains multiple instruments which record at different spatial, temporal, and spectral resolutions into instrument-specific units called granules, which are sub-regions of the Earth based upon the Field of View (FOV) of the satellite tracks and data retrieval algorithms. In developing this web-based tool, I will employ a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), utilizing a website interface, to provide services to access and grid datasets from the DAACs. I will program these services to accept requests for A-Train data lying within a bounding region of space and time, and extract those datasets that correspond to the user specified instruments, channels, region, and dates. I will also construct web services that will allow clients a range of options to visualize and animate the data based upon user parameters.