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Why Near Real-time/Low Latency is Important to Monitor the Changing World

An essential factor for remote sensing data products in impacting decision making is latency, or the time between earth observation and data are available to users. In many applications areas, latency plays an important or even decisive role where low latency earth observations help people to make timely, data-based decisions. Within the open and free NASA resources, NASA’s Land, Atmosphere Near real-time Capability for Earth Observing System (EOS) (LANCE) supports users interested in monitoring a wide variety of natural and man-made phenomena using near real-time (NRT) data products that are made available much quicker than routine processing allows. The combination of all available LANCE satellite products provides global coverage at multiple times per day, which makes it possible to meet user needs in various areas of applications including water resources, agriculture, air quality, wildland fire and many other disasters monitoring and management. As one of the prime users of LANCE, NASA’s Earth Science Applied Sciences Program promotes the use of LANCE data products to demonstrate applications in decision making and facilitates the end-user feedback to the science team to improve data products. One of the most critical applications that we expect data to be processed as close to the user as possible is wildland file response and management. User feedback indicates that LANCE NRT fire data products within 3 hours latency would meet the needs of the wildland fire community. Other examples of earth science application areas for which low latency is particularly important include detecting volcanic eruptions, early warning of disasters, tracking extreme weather events, and monitoring air quality.

Tian Yao

Enabling Earth Science Measurements with NASA UAS Capabilites

NASA's Airborne Science Program (ASP) maintains a fleet of manned and unmanned aircraft for Earth Science measurements and observations. The unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) range in size from very large (Global Hawks) to medium (SIERRA, Viking) and relatively small (DragonEye). UAS fly from very low (boundary layer) to very high altitude (stratosphere). NASA also supports science and applied science projects using UAS operated by outside companies or agencies. The aircraft and accompanying data and support systems have been used in numerous investigations. For example, Global Hawks have been used to study both hurricanes and atmospheric composition. SIERRA has been used to study ice, earthquake faults, and coral reefs. DragonEye is being used to measure volcanic emissions. As a foundation for NASA's UAS work, Altair and Ikkana not only flew wildfires in the Western US, but also provided major programs for the development of real-time data download and processing capabilities. In early 2014, an advanced L-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) also flew for the first time on Global Hawk, proving the utility of UAVSAR, which has been flying successfully on a manned aircraft. In this paper, we focus on two topics: 1) the results of a NASA program called UAS-Enabled Earth Science, in which three different science teams flew (at least) two different UAS to demonstrate platform performance, airspace integration, sensor performance, and applied science results from the data collected; 2) recent accomplishments with the high altitude, long-duration Global Hawks, especially measurements from several payload suites consisting of multiple instruments. The latest upgrades to data processing, communications, tracking and flight planning systems will also be described.

Earth Science

Summary of the Geocarto International Special Issue on "NASA Earth Science Satellite Data for Applications to Public Health" to be Published in Early 2014

At the 2011 Applied Science Public Health review held in Santa Fe, NM, it was announced that Dr. Dale Quattrochi from the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, John Haynes, Program Manager for the Applied Sciences Public Health program at NASA Headquarters, and Sue Estes, Deputy Program Manager for the NASA Applied Sciences Public Health Program located at the Universities Space Research Association (USRA) at the National Space Science and Technology Center (NSSTC) in Huntsville, AL, would edit a special issue of the journal Geocarto International on "NASA Earth Science Satellite Data for Applications to Public Health". This issue would be focused on compiling research papers that use NASA Earth Science satellite data for applications to public health. NASA's Public Health Program concentrates on advancing the realization of societal and economic benefits from NASA Earth Science in the areas of infectious disease, emergency preparedness and response, and environmental health (e.g., air quality). This application area as a focus of the NASA Applied Sciences program, has engaged public health institutions and officials with research scientists in exploring new applications of Earth Science satellite data as an integral part of public health decision- and policy-making at the local, state and federal levels. Of interest to this special issue are papers submitted on are topics such as epidemiologic surveillance in the areas of infectious disease, environmental health, and emergency response and preparedness, national and international activities to improve skills, share data and applications, and broaden the range of users who apply Earth Science satellite data in public health decisions, or related focus areas.. This special issue has now been completed and will be published n early 2014. This talk will present an overview of the papers that will be published in this special Geocarto International issue.

Quattrochi, Dale A.

Developing the Next Generation of Science Data System Engineers

At Goddard, engineers and scientists with a range of experience in science data systems are needed to employ new technologies and develop advances in capabilities for supporting new Earth and Space science research. Engineers with extensive experience in science data, software engineering and computer-information architectures are needed to lead and perform these activities. The increasing types and complexity of instrument data and emerging computer technologies coupled with the current shortage of computer engineers with backgrounds in science has led the need to develop a career path for science data systems engineers and architects.The current career path, in which undergraduate students studying various disciplines such as Computer Engineering or Physical Scientist, generally begins with serving on a development team in any of the disciplines where they can work in depth on existing Goddard data systems or serve with a specific NASA science team. There they begin to understand the data, infuse technologies, and begin to know the architectures of science data systems. From here the typical career involves peermentoring, on-the-job training or graduate level studies in analytics, computational science and applied science and mathematics. At the most senior level, engineers become subject matter experts and system architect experts, leading discipline-specific data centers and large software development projects. They are recognized as a subject matter expert in a science domain, they have project management expertise, lead standards efforts and lead international projects. A long career development remains necessary not only because of the breadth of knowledge required across physical sciences and engineering disciplines, but also because of the diversity of instrument data being developed today both by NASA and international partner agencies and because multidiscipline science and practitioner communities expect to have access to all types of observational data.This paper describes an approach to defining career-path guidance for college-bound high school and undergraduate engineering students, junior and senior engineers from various disciplines.

Next Generation of Science

Simplifying NASA Earth Science Data and Information Access Through Natural Language Processing Based Data Analysis and Visualization

NASA Earth science data collected from satellites, model assimilation, airborne missions, and field campaigns, are large, complex and evolving. Such characteristics pose great challenges for end users (e.g., Earth science and applied science users, students, citizen scientists), particularly for those who are unfamiliar with NASA's EOSDIS and thus unable to access and utilize datasets effectively. For example, a novice user may simply ask: what is the total rainfall for a flooding event in my county yesterday? For an experienced user (e.g., algorithm developer), a question can be: how did my rainfall product perform, compared to ground observations, during a flooding event? Nonetheless, with rapid information technology development such as natural language processing, it is possible to develop simplified Web interfaces and back-end processing components to handle such questions and deliver answers in terms of text, data, or graphic results directly to users.In this presentation, we describe the main challenges for end users with different levels of expertise in accessing and utilizing NASA Earth science data. Surveys reveal that most non-professional users normally do not want to download and handle raw data as well as conduct heavy-duty data processing tasks. Often they just want some simple graphics or data for various purposes. To them, simple and intuitive user interfaces are sufficient because complicated ones can be difficult and time-consuming to learn. Professionals also want such interfaces to answer many questions from datasets. One solution is to develop a natural language based search box like Google and the search results can be text, data, graphics and more. Now the challenge is, with natural language processing, can we design a system to process a scientific question typed in by a user? In this presentation, we describe our plan for such a prototype. The workflow is: 1) extract needed information (e.g., variables, spatial and temporal information, processing methods, etc.) from the input, 2) process the data in the backend, and 3) deliver the results (data or graphics) to the user.

Liu, Zhong

DAAC Collaboration Overview for AGU

The Atmospheric Science Data Center (ASDC), Goddard Earth Sciences Data and Information Systems Center (GES DISC), Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC), Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Land Processes DAAC, Alaska Satellite Facility (ASF), as well as NASA Global Imagery Browse Service (GIBS), Earth Science Data Systems (ESDS) Geographic Information Systems Team (EGIST), Earthdata Content Delivery Team, ArcGIS Online Governance Team, and the Systematic Data Transformation ACCESS team have come together to establish the ArcGIS DAAC Collaboration. This coalition of participants will demonstrate their use of the ArcGIS Enterprise to support Earth science research, applied science, and outreach using Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS) data. This includes the use of web services to fuse data products across space and time through services (e.g. ArcGIS Image Services, Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Web Coverage Service (WCS), and OGC Web Mapping Services (WMS)) for analysis in Jupyter notebooks, desktop tools, and web based applications.

Matthew Steven Tisdale

Report of the 1st SMAP Applications Workshop

The NASA Earth Science Division has made a commitment to “discover and demonstrate applications that inform resource management, policy development and decision making” (NASA Earth Science Division Applied Sciences Program, Program Strategy, 2010–2015). The NASA mission teams have the opportunity to take a lead role in meeting this challenge. A primary goal of the SMAP mission is to engage SMAP end users and build broad support for SMAP applications through a transparent and inclusive process. Toward this goal, the SMAP mission formed an open-community SMAP Applications Working Group (ApplWG) with over 150 members. The ApplWG held the first SMAP Applications Workshop on September 9–10, 2009, at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in Silver Spring, Maryland. Workshop attendees represented state and federal agencies, operational centers focused on natural hazards and disasters, international organizations, and academia. Introductory speakers from NOAA, US Geological Survey (USGS), US Department of Agriculture (USDA), Environment Canada, and US Department of Defense (DoD) addressed applications that included floods and droughts, early famine warning, crop assessments, human health, and defense.

O’Neill, P.

Perspectives on User Engagement of Satellite Earth Observation for Water Quality Management

The management and governance of our surface waters is core to life and prosperity on our planet. However, monitoring data are not available to many potential users and the disparate nature of water bodies makes consistent monitoring across so many systems difficult. While satellite Earth observation (EO) offers solutions, there are numerous challenges that limit the use of satellite EO for water monitoring. To understand the perceptions of using satellite EO for water quality monitoring, a survey was conducted within academia and the water quality management sector. Study objectives were to assess community understanding of satellite EO water quality data, identify barriers in the adoption of satellite EO data, and analyse trust in satellite EO data. Most (40 %) participants were beginners with little understanding of satellite EO. Participants indicated problems with satellite EO data accessibility (31 %) and interpretability (26 %). Results showed a high level of trust with satellite EO data and higher trust with in-situ EO data. This study highlighted the gap between water science, applied social science, and policy. A transdisciplinary approach to managing water resources is needed to bridge water disciplines and take a key role in areas such as social issues, knowledge brokering, and translation.

water quality

Materials Data Science Ontology(MDS-Onto): Unifying Domain Knowledge in Materials and Applied Data Science

Ontologies have gained popularity in the scientific community as a way to standardize terminologies in organizations’ data. Although certain cohorts have created frameworks with rules and guidelines on creating ontologies, there exist significant variations in how Materials Science ontologies are currently developed. We seek to provide guidance in the form of a unified automated framework for developing interoperable and modular ontologies for Materials Data Science that simplifies the ontology terms matching by establishing a semantic bridge up to the Basic Formal Ontology(BFO). This framework provides key recommendations on how ontologies should be positioned within the semantic web, what knowledge representation language is recommended, and where ontologies should be published online to boost their findability and interoperability. Two fundamental components of the MDS-Onto framework are the bilingual package called FAIRmaterials for ontology creation and FAIRLinked, for FAIR data creation. To showcase the practical capabilities of FAIRmaterials, we present two exemplar domain ontologies of MDS-Onto: Synchrotron X-Ray Diffraction and Photovoltaics.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY

Evaluation of a Potential for Enhancing the Decision Support System of the Interagency Modeling and Atmospheric Assessment Center with NASA Earth Science Research Results

NASA's objective for the Applied Sciences Program of the Science Mission Directorate is to expand and accelerate the realization of economic and societal benefits from Earth science, information, and technology. This objective is accomplished by using a systems approach to facilitate the incorporation of Earth observations and predictions into the decision-support tools used by partner organizations to provide essential services to society. The services include management of forest fires, coastal zones, agriculture, weather prediction, hazard mitigation, aviation safety, and homeland security. In this way, NASA's long-term research programs yield near-term, practical benefits to society. The Applied Sciences Program relies heavily on forging partnerships with other Federal agencies to accomplish its objectives. NASA chooses to partner with agencies that have existing connections with end-users, information infrastructure already in place, and decision support systems that can be enhanced by the Earth science information that NASA is uniquely poised to provide (NASA, 2004).

Blonski, Slawomir

Goddard DEVELOP Students: Using NASA Remote Sensing Technology to Study the Chesapeake Bay Watershed

The DEVELOP National Program is an Earth Science research internship, operating under NASA s Applied Sciences Program. Each spring, summer, and fall, DEVELOP interns form teams to investigate Earth Science related issues. Since the Fall of 2003, Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) has been home to one of 10 national DEVELOP teams. In past terms, students completed a variety of projects related to the Applied Sciences Applications of National Priority, such as Public Health, Natural Disasters, Water Resources, and Ecological Forecasting. These projects have focused on areas all over the world, including the United States, Africa, and Asia. Recently, Goddard DEVELOP students have turned their attention to a local environment, the Chesapeake Bay Watershed. The Chesapeake Bay Watershed is a complex and diverse ecosystem, spanning approximately 64,000 square miles. The watershed encompasses parts of six states: Delaware, Maryland, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and West Virginia, as well as the District of Columbia. The Bay itself is the biggest estuary in the United States, with over 100,000 tributaries feeding into it. The ratio of fresh water to salt water varies throughout the Bay, allowing for a variety of habitats. The Bay s wetlands, marshes, forests, reefs, and rivers support more than 3,600 plant and animal species, including birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, fish, and crabs. The Bay is also commercially significant. It is ranked third in the nation in fishery catch, and supplies approximately 500 million pounds of seafood annually. In addition to its abundant flora and fauna, the Chesapeake Bay watershed is home to approximately 16.6 million people, who live and work throughout the watershed, and who use its diverse resources for recreational purposes. Over the past several decades, the population throughout the watershed has increased rapidly, resulting in land use changes, and ultimately decreasing the health of the Chesapeake Bay Watershed. Over the course of 2009-2010, student teams carried out two independent research projects focused on the Chesapeake Bay Watershed. The first investigated the threat of invasive species to forests in Maryland. The second investigated the detection of winter cover crops throughout the watershed from satellite data.

Moore, Rachel

SERVIR Science Applications for Capacity Building

SERVIR is a regional visualization and monitoring system using Earth observations to support environmental management, climate adaptation, and disaster response in developing countries. SERVIR is jointly sponsored by NASA and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). SERVIR has been instrumental in development of science applications to support the decision-making and capacity building in the developing countries with the help of SERVIR Hubs. In 2011, NASA Research Opportunities in Space and Earth Sciences (ROSES) included a call for proposals to form SERVIR Applied Sciences Team (SERVIR AST) under Applied Sciences Capacity Building Program. Eleven proposals were selected, the Principal Investigators of which comprise the core of the SERVIR AST. The expertise on the Team span several societal benefit areas including agriculture, disasters, public health and air quality, water, climate and terrestrial carbon assessments. This presentation will cover the existing SERVIR science applications, capacity building components, overview of SERVIR AST projects, and anticipated impacts.

Limaye, Ashutosh

NASA Earth Observations Informing Renewable Energy Management and Policy Decision Making

The NASA Applied Sciences Program partners with domestic and international governmental organizations, universities, and private entities to improve their decisions and assessments. These improvements are enabled by using the knowledge generated from research resulting from spacecraft observations and model predictions conducted by NASA and providing these as inputs to the decision support and scenario assessment tools used by partner organizations. The Program is divided into eight societal benefit areas, aligned in general with the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) themes. The Climate Application of the Applied Sciences Program has as one of its focuses, efforts to provide for improved decisions and assessments in the areas of renewable energy technologies, energy efficiency, and climate change impacts. The goals of the Applied Sciences Program are aligned with national initiatives such as the U.S. Climate Change Science and Technology Programs and with those of international organizations including the Group on Earth Observations (GEO) and the Committee on Earth Observation Satellites (CEOS). Activities within the Program are funded principally through proposals submitted in response to annual solicitations and reviewed by peers.

Eckman, Richard S.

Applying Social Science Methods to Assess and Improve Program Outcomes: A Case Study on the Gap Region Outreach Project

This paper outlines a replicable framework for assessing gaps, reach, and the impact of technical assistance (TA) programs, using the Energy to Communities (E2C) Gap Region Outreach Project as a case study. By applying qualitative social science methods, this framework provides tools for effectively engaging with underrepresented regions, identifying barriers to participation, and tailoring solutions to local needs. The study highlights the importance of leveraging stakeholder insights to address disparities in program engagement and participation, offering actionable recommendations to enhance program responsiveness and optimize resource allocation. This approach serves as a guide for practitioners seeking to expand the reach and effectiveness of federally funded TA programs while ensuring alignment with community priorities and capacity needs.

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS

Assessment of Soil Moisture Data Requirements by the Potential SMAP Data User Community: Review of SMAP Mission User Community

NASA's Soil Moisture Active and Passive (SMAP) mission is planned for launch in October 2014 and will provide global measurements of soil moisture and freeze thaw state. The project is driven by both basic research and applied science goals. Understanding how application driven end-users will apply SMAP data, prior to the satellite's launch, is an important goal of NASA's applied science program and SMAP mission success. Because SMAP data are unique, there are no direct proxy data sets that can be used in research and operational studies to determine how the data will interact with existing processes. The objective of this study is to solicit data requirements, accuracy needs, and current understanding of the SMAP mission from the potential user community. This study showed that the data to be provided by the SMAP mission did substantially meet the user community needs. Although there was a broad distribution of requirements stated, the SMAP mission fit within these requirements.

applications

Experimental Resonance Enhanced Multiphoton Ionization (REMPI) studies of small molecules

Resonance enhanced multiphoton ionization (REMPI) utilizes tunable dye lasers to ionize an atom or molecule by first preparing an excited state by multiphoton absorption and then ionizing that state before it can decay. This process is highly selective with respect to both the initial and resonant intermediate states of the target, and it can be extremely sensitive. In addition, the products of the REMPI process can be detected as needed by analyzing the resulting electrons, ions, fluorescence, or by additional REMPI. This points to a number of exciting opportunities for both basic and applied science. On the applied side, REMPI has great potential as an ultrasensitive, highly selective detector for trace, reactive, or transient species. On the basic side, REMPI affords an unprecedented means of exploring excited state physics and chemistry at the quantum-state-specific level. An overview of current studies of excited molecular states is given to illustrate the principles and prospects of REMPI.

Dehmer, J. L.