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At least 415 records · Page 23

Aerial drone fleet deployment optimization with endogenous battery replacements for direct delivery of time-sensitive products

Aerial drones offer a distinct potential to reduce the delivery time and energy consumption for the delivery of time-sensitive and small products. However, there is still a need in the relevant industry to understand the performance of drone-based delivery under different business needs and drone operating conditions. We studied a drone deployment optimization problem for direct delivery of time-sensitive products with release dates to customers maintaining a specified time window. This paper presents a new mixed-integer programming model, new valid inequalities, a new greedy heuristic algorithm, and a Genetic algorithm to help business owners optimally schedule and route their drone fleet minimizing the required fleet size, the required number of additional batteries, and total energy consumption. A realistic feature of the optimization method is that instead of replacing the drone battery after each return to the depot, it keeps track of the remaining energy in the drone battery and decides on battery replacements accounting for the drone routing and the user-specified minimum required battery energy. Numerical results based on real data from drone flight tests and prepared food delivery industry provide insights into the effect of different practical drone operating parameters on the required fleet size, the required number of battery replacements, and energy consumption. Here, results demonstrate that the proposed heuristic algorithm substantially outperforms the accelerated CPLEX in runtime while sacrificing the solution quality by a small amount. Additionally, results show that using a mixed fleet of hexacopter and quadcopter drones reduces the total energy consumption by 48.52% compared to using a homogeneous fleet of only hexacopters.

Drone energy consumption↗

MAMS: High resolution atmospheric/surface properties

The Multispectral Atmospheric Mapping Sensor (MAMS) has been used for a number of investigations over the last 8 years. It has served as the basis for retrieval technique development, for atmospheric process studies, and to retrieve geophysical parameters at the surface (land and ocean). It was used most recently to collect high resolution visible and infrared imagery for the CaPE and STORMFEST experiments during FY91 and FY92. The Wildfire spectrometer (similar to MAMS but with different infrared channels) was also used during STORMFEST. The goals of MAMS during CaPE were: (1) to collect MAMS data to support the overall CaPE science objectives; (2) refine techniques for the retrieval of atmospheric moisture and surface geophysical parameters; (3) map the moisture distributions associated with the sea breeze front over Florida with MAMS ancillary satellite data on a case study basis; (4) identify surface features which may serve as local sources of heat and moisture and influence preferential convective regions over Florida, and (5) process MAMS data and derived relevant geophysical parameters to support other CaPE investigators. For STORMFEST both the MAMS and Wildfire spectrometers were used to collect unique multispectral data to study atmospheric processes. The Wildfire objectives were: (1) to collect high quality Wildfire data in conjunction with other in situ and remote measurements available during the STORMFEST field phase (1 February - 15 March 1992); (2) to develop algorithms to retrieve total ozone content and compare with those from TOMS and HIRS (IR); and (3) along with water vapor imagery, use the ozone data to better understand the 3-dimensional structure and dynamics of jet streaks and frontal systems in a case study investigation. The MAMS objectives were: (1) collect MAMS data to support a GSFC investigation of gravity waves; and (2) process the MAMS data to locate gravity wave features, and produce various moisture products in support of the gravity wave investigation. The research activities over the last year are presented and they focused on analyzing the CaPE data sets and collecting and starting preliminary analysis of the STORMFEST MAMS and Wildfire data.

Jedlovec, Gary J.↗

Future of Big Earth Data Analytics

The state of the art of Big Earth Data Analytics can be expected to evolve rapidly in the coming years. The forces driving evolution come from both growth in the data and advancement in the field of data analytics. In the data area, advances in sensor instrumentation and platform miniaturization are increasing both data resolution and coverage, resulting in enormous growth in data Volume. Increases in temporal resolution in particular also generate demands for higher data Velocity. At the same time, the proliferation of instruments and the platforms on which they reside is increasing the Variety of datasets. The Variety increase in turn leads to questions about the Veracity of the data. In the algorithm area, powerful machine learning methods are coming to the fore, particularly Deep Neural Networks. These are powerful at detecting interesting features in the data, integrating many different measurements (i.e., data fusion), and classification problems. However, they are still challenging when seeking explanations of how natural or socio-economic phenomena work using Earth Observations. Thus, classical analysis techniques will remain relevant when the emphasis is on forming or testing explanations, as well as to support interactive data exploration.

Lynnes, Christopher↗

Time Relevance of Convective Weather Forecast for Air Traffic Automation

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is handling nearly 120,000 flights a day through its Air Traffic Management (ATM) system and air traffic congestion is expected to increse substantially over the next 20 years. Weather-induced impacts to throughput and efficiency are the leading cause of flight delays accounting for 70% of all delays with convective weather accounting for 60% of all weather related delays. To support the Next Generation Air Traffic System goal of operating at 3X current capacity in the NAS, ATC decision support tools are being developed to create advisories to assist controllers in all weather constraints. Initial development of these decision support tools did not integrate information regarding weather constraints such as thunderstorms and relied on an additional system to provide that information. Future Decision Support Tools should move towards an integrated system where weather constraints are factored into the advisory of a Decision Support Tool (DST). Several groups such at NASA-Ames, Lincoln Laboratories, and MITRE are integrating convective weather data with DSTs. A survey of current convective weather forecast and observation data show they span a wide range of temporal and spatial resolutions. Short range convective observations can be obtained every 5 mins with longer range forecasts out to several days updated every 6 hrs. Today, the short range forecasts of less than 2 hours have a temporal resolution of 5 mins. Beyond 2 hours, forecasts have much lower temporal. resolution of typically 1 hour. Spatial resolutions vary from 1km for short range to 40km for longer range forecasts. Improving the accuracy of long range convective forecasts is a major challenge. A report published by the National Research Council states improvements for convective forecasts for the 2 to 6 hour time frame will only be achieved for a limited set of convective phenomena in the next 5 to 10 years. Improved longer range forecasts will be probabilistic as opposed to the deterministic shorter range forecasts. Despite the known low level of confidence with respect to long range convective forecasts, these data are still useful to a DST routing algorithm. It is better to develop an aircraft route using the best information available than no information. The temporally coarse long range forecast data needs to be interpolated to be useful to a DST. A DST uses aircraft trajectory predictions that need to be evaluated for impacts by convective storms. Each time-step of a trajectory prediction n&s to be checked against weather data. For the case of coarse temporal data, there needs to be a method fill in weather data where there is none. Simply using the coarse weather data without any interpolation can result in DST routes that are impacted by regions of strong convection. Increasing the temporal resolution of these data can be achieved but result in a large dataset that may prove to be an operational challenge in transmission and loading by a DST. Currently, it takes about 7mins retrieve a 7mb RUC2 forecast file from NOAA at NASA-Ames Research Center. A prototype NCWF6 1 hour forecast is about 3mb in size. A Six hour NCWFG forecast with a 1hr forecast time-step will be about l8mb (6 x 3mb). A 6 hour NCWF6 forecast with a l5min forecast time-step will be about 7mb (24 x 3mb). Based on the time it takes to retrieve a 7mb RUC2 forecast, it will take approximately 70mins to retrieve a 6 hour NCWF forecast with 15min time steps. Until those issues are addressed, there is a need to develop an algorithm that interpolates between these temporally coarse long range forecasts. This paper describes a method of how to use low temporal resolution probabilistic weather forecasts in a DST. The beginning of this paper is a description of some convective weather forecast and observation products followed by an example of how weather data are used by a DST. The subsequent sections will describe probabilistic forecasts followed by a descrtion of a method to use low temporal resolution probabilistic weather forecasts by providing a relevance value to these data outside of their valid times.

Chan, William N.↗

Confidence-Based Feature Acquisition

Confidence-based Feature Acquisition (CFA) is a novel, supervised learning method for acquiring missing feature values when there is missing data at both training (learning) and test (deployment) time. To train a machine learning classifier, data is encoded with a series of input features describing each item. In some applications, the training data may have missing values for some of the features, which can be acquired at a given cost. A relevant JPL example is that of the Mars rover exploration in which the features are obtained from a variety of different instruments, with different power consumption and integration time costs. The challenge is to decide which features will lead to increased classification performance and are therefore worth acquiring (paying the cost). To solve this problem, CFA, which is made up of two algorithms (CFA-train and CFA-predict), has been designed to greedily minimize total acquisition cost (during training and testing) while aiming for a specific accuracy level (specified as a confidence threshold). With this method, it is assumed that there is a nonempty subset of features that are free; that is, every instance in the data set includes these features initially for zero cost. It is also assumed that the feature acquisition (FA) cost associated with each feature is known in advance, and that the FA cost for a given feature is the same for all instances. Finally, CFA requires that the base-level classifiers produce not only a classification, but also a confidence (or posterior probability).

Wagstaff, Kiri L.↗

Visualization of Traffic Accidents

Traffic accidents have tremendous impact on society. Annually approximately 6.4 million vehicle accidents are reported by police in the US and nearly half of them result in catastrophic injuries. Visualizations of traffic accidents using geographic information systems (GIS) greatly facilitate handling and analysis of traffic accidents in many aspects. Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI), Inc. is the world leader in GIS research and development. ArcGIS, a software package developed by ESRI, has the capabilities to display events associated with a road network, such as accident locations, and pavement quality. But when event locations related to a road network are processed, the existing algorithm used by ArcGIS does not utilize all the information related to the routes of the road network and produces erroneous visualization results of event locations. This software bug causes serious problems for applications in which accurate location information is critical for emergency responses, such as traffic accidents. This paper aims to address this problem and proposes an improved method that utilizes all relevant information of traffic accidents, namely, route number, direction, and mile post, and extracts correct event locations for accurate traffic accident visualization and analysis. The proposed method generates a new shape file for traffic accidents and displays them on top of the existing road network in ArcGIS. Visualization of traffic accidents along Hampton Roads Bridge Tunnel is included to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Wang, Jie↗

Advancing Data Assimilation in Operational Hydrologic Forecasting: Progresses, Challenges, and Emerging Opportunities

Data assimilation (DA) holds considerable potential for improving hydrologic predictions as demonstrated in numerous research studies. However, advances in hydrologic DA research have not been adequately or timely implemented in operational forecast systems to improve the skill of forecasts for better informed real-world decision making. This is due in part to a lack of mechanisms to properly quantify the uncertainty in observations and forecast models in real-time forecasting situations and to conduct the merging of data and models in a way that is adequately efficient and transparent to operational forecasters. The need for effective DA of useful hydrologic data into the forecast process has become increasingly recognized in recent years. This motivated a hydrologic DA workshop in Delft, the Netherlands in November 2010, which focused on advancing DA in operational hydrologic forecasting and water resources management. As an outcome of the workshop, this paper reviews, in relevant detail, the current status of DA applications in both hydrologic research and operational practices, and discusses the existing or potential hurdles and challenges in transitioning hydrologic DA research into cost-effective operational forecasting tools, as well as the potential pathways and newly emerging opportunities for overcoming these challenges. Several related aspects are discussed, including (1) theoretical or mathematical aspects in DA algorithms, (2) the estimation of different types of uncertainty, (3) new observations and their objective use in hydrologic DA, (4) the use of DA for real-time control of water resources systems, and (5) the development of community-based, generic DA tools for hydrologic applications. It is recommended that cost-effective transition of hydrologic DA from research to operations should be helped by developing community-based, generic modeling and DA tools or frameworks, and through fostering collaborative efforts among hydrologic modellers, DA developers, and operational forecasters.

forecasting↗

Launch Vehicle Manual Steering with Adaptive Augmenting Control:In-Flight Evaluations of Adverse Interactions Using a Piloted Aircraft

An Adaptive Augmenting Control (AAC) algorithm for the Space Launch System (SLS) has been developed at the Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) as part of the launch vehicle's baseline flight control system. A prototype version of the SLS flight control software was hosted on a piloted aircraft at the Armstrong Flight Research Center to demonstrate the adaptive controller on a full-scale realistic application in a relevant flight environment. Concerns regarding adverse interactions between the adaptive controller and a potential manual steering mode were also investigated by giving the pilot trajectory deviation cues and pitch rate command authority, which is the subject of this paper. Two NASA research pilots flew a total of 25 constant pitch rate trajectories using a prototype manual steering mode with and without adaptive control, evaluating six different nominal and off-nominal test case scenarios. Pilot comments and PIO ratings were given following each trajectory and correlated with aircraft state data and internal controller signals post-flight.

adaptive control↗

A Deterministic Electron, Photon, Proton and Heavy Ion Radiation Transport Suite for the Study of the Jovian System

A deterministic suite of radiation transport codes, developed at NASA Langley Research Center (LaRC), which describe the transport of electrons, photons, protons, and heavy ions in condensed media is used to simulate exposures from spectral distributions typical of electrons, protons and carbon-oxygen-sulfur (C-O-S) trapped heavy ions in the Jovian radiation environment. The particle transport suite consists of a coupled electron and photon deterministic transport algorithm (CEPTRN) and a coupled light particle and heavy ion deterministic transport algorithm (HZETRN). The primary purpose for the development of the transport suite is to provide a means for the spacecraft design community to rapidly perform numerous repetitive calculations essential for electron, proton and heavy ion radiation exposure assessments in complex space structures. In this paper, the radiation environment of the Galilean satellite Europa is used as a representative boundary condition to show the capabilities of the transport suite. While the transport suite can directly access the output electron spectra of the Jovian environment as generated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) Galileo Interim Radiation Electron (GIRE) model of 2003; for the sake of relevance to the upcoming Europa Jupiter System Mission (EJSM), the 105 days at Europa mission fluence energy spectra provided by JPL is used to produce the corresponding dose-depth curve in silicon behind an aluminum shield of 100 mils ( 0.7 g/sq cm). The transport suite can also accept ray-traced thickness files from a computer-aided design (CAD) package and calculate the total ionizing dose (TID) at a specific target point. In that regard, using a low-fidelity CAD model of the Galileo probe, the transport suite was verified by comparing with Monte Carlo (MC) simulations for orbits JOI--J35 of the Galileo extended mission (1996-2001). For the upcoming EJSM mission with a potential launch date of 2020, the transport suite is used to compute the traditional aluminum-silicon dose-depth calculation as a standard shield-target combination output, as well as the shielding response of high charge (Z) shields such as tantalum (Ta). Finally, a shield optimization algorithm is used to guide the instrument designer with the choice of graded-Z shield analysis.

Norman, Ryan B.↗

Collaborative Data Curation to Support the Multi-Mission Algorithm and Analysis Platform (MAAP)

Upcoming space-borne missions will offer unprecedented data about Earth but will also feature exponentially high data volumes. These high data volumes will change the way the scientific community works with data and will also create a unique need for improved data sharing and collaboration. NASA and ESA are working together to address these issues by collaboratively developing the Multi-Mission Algorithm and Analysis Platform (MAAP) to improve the understanding of global aboveground terrestrial carbon dynamics. The MAAP will support ESA’s BIOMASS mission, NASA’s GEDI mission and NASA/ISRO’s NISAR mission. The MAAP will be developed in two phases: a pilot phase and a full production phase. The pilot phase will demonstrate collaboration and basic capabilities. The pilot phase will focus on biomass relevant airborne and field campaign data. Two NASA teams are supporting the development of the MAAP. The MAAP engineering team is responsible for the development, maintenance and operations of the MAAP system while the MAAP data team ensures the ongoing quality of the data, metadata and other information provided in the MAAP. The MAAP data team also supports the ingest and archive of identified data to the MAAP platform. This poster describes the use case development process for the pilot MAAP and the data curated in support of those use cases. Additionally, this presentation will outline the pilot MAAP data ingest process and metadata curation effort along with efforts to ensure interoperability between ESA and NASA data and metadata.

Bugbee, Kaylin↗

miss-SNF: a multimodal patient similarity network integration approach to handle completely missing data sources

Abstract Motivation Precision medicine leverages patient-specific multimodal data to improve prevention, diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment of diseases. Advancing precision medicine requires the non-trivial integration of complex, heterogeneous, and potentially high-dimensional data sources, such as multi-omics and clinical data. In the literature, several approaches have been proposed to manage missing data, but are usually limited to the recovery of subsets of features for a subset of patients. A largely overlooked problem is the integration of multiple sources of data when one or more of them are completely missing for a subset of patients, a relatively common condition in clinical practice. Results We propose miss-Similarity Network Fusion (miss-SNF), a novel general-purpose data integration approach designed to manage completely missing data in the context of patient similarity networks. miss-SNF integrates incomplete unimodal patient similarity networks by leveraging a non-linear message-passing strategy borrowed from the SNF algorithm. miss-SNF is able to recover missing patient similarities and is “task agnostic”, in the sense that can integrate partial data for both unsupervised and supervised prediction tasks. Experimental analyses on nine cancer datasets from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) demonstrate that miss-SNF achieves state-of-the-art results in recovering similarities and in identifying patients subgroups enriched in clinically relevant variables and having differential survival. Moreover, amputation experiments show that miss-SNF supervised prediction of cancer clinical outcomes and Alzheimer’s disease diagnosis with completely missing data achieves results comparable to those obtained when all the data are available. Availability and implementation miss-SNF code, implemented in R, is available at https://github.com/AnacletoLAB/missSNF.

Biochemistry & Molecular Biology↗

Application of Laser Scanning Confocal Microscopy to Heat and Mass Transport Modeling in Porous Microstructures

Laser Scanning Confocal Microscopy (LSCM) has been used to obtain digital images of the complicated 3-D (three-dimensional) microstructures of rigid, fibrous thermal protection system (TPS) materials. These orthotropic materials are comprised of refractory ceramic fibers with diameters in the range of 1 to 10 microns and have open porosities of 0.8 or more. Algorithms are being constructed to extract quantitative microstructural information from the digital data so that it may be applied to specific heat and mass transport modeling efforts; such information includes, for example, the solid and pore volume fractions, the internal surface area per volume, fiber diameter distributions, and fiber orientation distributions. This type of information is difficult to obtain in general, yet it is directly relevant to many computational efforts which seek to model macroscopic thermophysical phenomena in terms of microscopic mechanisms or interactions. Two such computational efforts for fibrous TPS materials are: i) the calculation of radiative transport properties; ii) the modeling of gas permeabilities.

Marshall, Jochen↗

Extrapolation of the dna fragment-size distribution after high-dose irradiation to predict effects at low doses

The patterns of DSBs induced in the genome are different for sparsely and densely ionizing radiations: In the former case, the patterns are well described by a random-breakage model; in the latter, a more sophisticated tool is needed. We used a Monte Carlo algorithm with a random-walk geometry of chromatin, and a track structure defined by the radial distribution of energy deposition from an incident ion, to fit the PFGE data for fragment-size distribution after high-dose irradiation. These fits determined the unknown parameters of the model, enabling the extrapolation of data for high-dose irradiation to the low doses that are relevant for NASA space radiation research. The randomly-located-clusters formalism was used to speed the simulations. It was shown that only one adjustable parameter, Q, the track efficiency parameter, was necessary to predict DNA fragment sizes for wide ranges of doses. This parameter was determined for a variety of radiations and LETs and was used to predict the DSB patterns at the HPRT locus of the human X chromosome after low-dose irradiation. It was found that high-LET radiation would be more likely than low-LET radiation to induce additional DSBs within the HPRT gene if this gene already contained one DSB.

NASA Discipline Radiation Health↗

Semi-Supervised Data Summarization: Using Spectral Libraries to Improve Hyperspectral Clustering

Hyperspectral imagers produce very large images, with each pixel recorded at hundreds or thousands of different wavelengths. The ability to automatically generate summaries of these data sets enables several important applications, such as quickly browsing through a large image repository or determining the best use of a limited bandwidth link (e.g., determining which images are most critical for full transmission). Clustering algorithms can be used to generate these summaries, but traditional clustering methods make decisions based only on the information contained in the data set. In contrast, we present a new method that additionally leverages existing spectral libraries to identify materials that are likely to be present in the image target area. We find that this approach simultaneously reduces runtime and produces summaries that are more relevant to science goals.

Wagstaff, K. L.↗

GENIE Flight Test Results and System Overview

NASA has envisioned a suite of lander test vehicles that will be flown in Earth s atmosphere to incrementally demonstrate applicable lunar lander performance in the terrestrial environment. As each terrestrial rocket progresses in maturity, relevant space flight technology matures to a higher technology readiness level, preparing it for inclusion on a future lunar lander design.. NASA s "Project M" lunar mission concept flew its first terrestrial rocket, RR1, in June 2010 in Caddo Mills, Texas. The Draper Laboratory built GENIE (Guidance Embedded Navigator Integration Environment) successfully demonstrated accurate, real time, embedded performance of Project M navigation and guidance algorithms in a highly dynamic environment. The RR1 vehicle, built by Armadillo Aerospace, performed a successful 60 second free flight and gave the team great confidence in Project M s highly reliable and robust GNC system design and implementation. This paper provides an overview of the GENIE system and describes recent flight performance test results onboard the RR1 terrestrial rocket.

Brady, Tye↗

Effect of Helical Slow-Wave Circuit Variations on TWT Cold-Test Characteristics

Recent advances in the state of the art of computer modeling offer the possibility for the first time to evaluate the effect that slow-wave structure parameter variations, such'as manufacturing tolerances, have on the cold-test characteristics of helical traveling-wave tubes (TWT's). This will enable manufacturers to determine the cost effectiveness of controlling the dimensions of the component parts of the TWT, which is almost impossible to do experimentally without building a large number of tubes and controlling several parameters simultaneously. The computer code MAxwell's equations by the Finite Integration Algorithm (MAFIA) is used in this analysis to determine the effect on dispersion and on-axis interaction impedance of several helical slow-wave circuit parameter variations, including thickness and relative dielectric constant of the support rods, tape width, and height of the metallized films deposited on the dielectric rods. Previous computer analyzes required so many approximations that accurate determinations of the effect of many relevant dimensions on tube performance were practically impossible.

Kory, Carol L.↗

Analysis of the Performance Characteristics of the Five-Channel Microtops II Sun Photometer for Measuring Aerosol Optical Thickness and Precipitable Water Vapor

Five Microtops II sun photometers were studied in detail at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) to determine their performance in measuring aerosol optical thickness (AOT or Tau(sub alphalambda) and precipitable column water vapor (W). Each derives Tau(sub alphalambda) from measured signals at four wavelengths lambda (340, 440, 675, and 870 nm), and W from the 936 nm signal measurements. Accuracy of Tau(sub alphalambda) and W determination depends on the reliability of the relevant channel calibration coefficient (V(sub 0)). Relative calibration by transfer of parameters from a more accurate sun photometer (such as the Mauna-Loa-calibrated AERONET master sun photometer at GSFC) is more reliable than Langley calibration performed at GSFC. It was found that the factory-determined value of the instrument constant for the 936 nm filter (k= 0.7847) used in the Microtops' internal algorithm is unrealistic, causing large errors in V(sub 0(936)), Tau(sub alpha936), and W. Thus, when applied for transfer calibration at GSFC, whereas the random variation of V(aub 0) at 340 to 870 nm is quite small, with coefficients of variation (CV) in the range of 0 to 2.4%, at 936 nm the CV goes up to 19%. Also, the systematic temporal variation of V(sub 0) at 340 to 870 nm is very slow, while at 936 nm it is large and exhibits a very high dependence on W. The algorithm also computes Tau(sub alpha936) as 0.91Tau(sub alpha870), which is highly simplistic. Therefore, it is recommended to determine Tau(sub alpha936) by logarithmic extrapolation from Tau(sub alpha675) and Tau(sub alpha 870. From the operational standpoint of the Microtops, apart from errors that may result from unperceived cloud contamination, the main sources of error include inaccurate pointing to the Sun, neglecting to clean the front quartz window, and neglecting to calibrate correctly. If these three issues are adequately taken care of, the Microtops can be quite accurate and stable, with root mean square (rms) differences between corresponding retrievals from clean calibrated Microtops and the AERONET sun photometer being about +/-0.02 at 340 nm, decreasing down to about +/-0.01 at 870 nm.

Ichoku, Charles↗

Utilization of Ancillary Data Sets for SMAP Algorithm Development and Product Generation

Algorithms being developed for the Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) mission require a variety of both static and ancillary data. The selection of the most appropriate source for each ancillary data parameter is driven by a number of considerations, including accuracy, latency, availability, and consistency across all SMAP products and with SMOS (Soil Moisture Ocean Salinity). It is anticipated that initial selection of all ancillary datasets, which are needed for ongoing algorithm development activities on the SMAP algorithm testbed at JPL, will be completed within the year. These datasets will be updated as new or improved sources become available, and all selections and changes will be documented for the benefit of the user community. Wise choices in ancillary data will help to enable SMAP to provide new global measurements of soil moisture and freeze/thaw state at the targeted accuracy necessary to tackle hydrologically-relevant societal issues.

ONeill, P.↗