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Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) Mission Products and Services at the NASA Goddard Earth Sciences Data and Information Services Center (GES DISC)

On February 27, 2014, the NASA Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission was launched to provide the next-generation global observations of rain and snow (http:pmm.nasa.govGPM). The GPM mission consists of an international network of satellites in which a GPM Core Observatory satellite carries both active and passive microwave instruments to measure precipitation and serve as a reference standard, to unify precipitation measurements from a constellation of other research and operational satellites. The NASA Goddard Earth Sciences (GES) Data and Information Services Center (DISC) hosts and distributes GPM data within the NASA Earth Observation System Data Information System (EOSDIS). The GES DISC is home to the data archive for the GPM predecessor, the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM). Over the past 16 years, the GES DISC has served the scientific as well as other communities with TRMM data and user-friendly services. During the GPM era, the GES DISC will continue to provide user-friendly data services and customer support to users around the world. GPM products currently and to-be available include the following:Level-1 GPM Microwave Imager (GMI) and partner radiometer productsLevel-2 Goddard Profiling Algorithm (GPROF) GMI and partner productsLevel-3 daily and monthly productsIntegrated Multi-satellitE Retrievals for GPM (IMERG) products (early, late, and final) A dedicated Web portal (including user guides, etc.) has been developed for GPM data (http:disc.sci.gsfc.nasa.govgpm). Data services that are currently and to-be available include Google-like Mirador (http:mirador.gsfc.nasa.gov) for data search and access; data access through various Web services (e.g., OPeNDAP, GDS, WMS, WCS); conversion into various formats (e.g., netCDF, HDF, KML (for Google Earth), ASCII); exploration, visualization, and statistical online analysis through Giovanni (http:giovanni.gsfc.nasa.gov); generation of value-added products; parameter and spatial subsetting; time aggregation; regridding; data version control and provenance; documentation; science support for proper data usage, FAQ, help desk; monitoring services (e.g. Current Conditions) for applications.

precipitation↗

The Salinity Pilot-Mission Exploitation Platform (Pi-MEP): A Hub for Validation and Exploitation of Satellite Sea Surface Salinity Data

The Pilot-Mission Exploitation Platform (Pi-MEP) for salinity is an ESA initiative originally meant to support and widen the uptake of Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission data over the ocean. Starting in 2017, the project aims at setting up a computational web-based platform focusing on satellite sea surface salinity data, supporting studies on enhanced validation and scientific process over the ocean. It has been designed in close collaboration with a dedicated science advisory group in order to achieve three main objectives: gathering all the data required to exploit satellite sea surface salinity data, systematically producing a wide range of metrics for comparing and monitoring sea surface salinity products’ quality, and providing user-friendly tools to explore, visualize and exploit both the collected products and the results of the automated analyses. The Salinity Pi-MEP is becoming a reference hub for the validation of satellite sea surface salinity missions by providing valuable information on satellite products (SMOS, Aquarius, SMAP), an extensive in situ database (e.g., Argo, thermosalinographs, moorings, drifters) and additional thematic datasets (precipitation, evaporation, currents, sea level anomalies, sea surface temperature, etc.). Co-localized databases between satellite products and in situ datasets are systematically generated together with validation analysis reports for 30 predefined regions. The data and reports are made fully accessible through the web interface of the platform. The datasets, validation metrics and tools (automatic, user-driven) of the platform are described in detail in this paper. Several dedicated scientific case studies involving satellite SSS data are also systematically monitored by the platform, including major river plumes, mesoscale signatures in boundary currents, high latitudes, semi-enclosed seas, and the high-precipitation region of the eastern tropical Pacific. Since 2019, a partnership in the Salinity Pi-MEP project has been agreed between ESA and NASA to enlarge focus to encompass the entire set of satellite salinity sensors. The two agencies are now working together to widen the platform features on several technical aspects, such as triple-collocation software implementation, additional match-up collocation criteria and sustained exploitation of data from the SPURS campaigns

ocean↗

The Future of NASA Earth Science in the Commercial Cloud: Challenges and Opportunities

NASA produces a large volume and variety of data products that are used every day to support research, decision making, and education. The widespread use of NASA’s Earth Science data is enabled by NASA’s Earth Science Data System (ESDS) program, which oversees the archiving and distribution of these data and invests in the development of new data systems and tools. However, NASA’s current approach to Earth Science data distribution — based on distributed institutional archives with individual on-premises high-performance computing capabilities — faces some significant challenges, including massive increases in data volume from upcoming missions, a greater need for transdisciplinary science that synthesizes many different kinds of observations, and a push to make science more open, inclusive, and accessible. To address these challenges, NASA is aggressively migrating its Earth Science data and related tools and services into the commercial cloud. Migration of data into the commercial cloud can significantly improve NASA’s existing data system capabilities by (1) providing more flexible options for storage and compute (including rapid, as-needed access to state-of-the-art capabilities); (2) by centralizing and standardizing data access, which gives all of NASA’s institutional data centers access to all of each other’s datasets; and (3) by facilitating “analysis-in-place”, whereby users can bring their own computational workflows and tools to the data rather than having to maintain their own copies of NASA datasets. However, migration to the commercial cloud also poses some significant challenges, including (1) managing costs under a “pay-as-you-go” model; (2) incompatibility with existing tools and data formats with object-based storage and network access; (3) vendor lock-in; (4) challenges with data access for workflows that mix on-premise and cloud computing; and (5) standardization for highly diverse data as is present in NASA’s data archive. I conclude with two examples of recent NASA activities showcasing capabilities enabled by the commercial cloud: An interactive analysis and development platform for analyzing airborne imaging spectroscopy data, and a new collection of tools and services for data discovery, analysis, publication, and data-driven storytelling (Visualization, Exploration, and Data Analysis, VEDA).

Alexey N Shiklomanov↗

The CEOS Data Cube Portal: A User-Friendly, Open Source Software Solution for the Distribution, Exploration, Analysis, and Visualization of Analysis Ready Data

There is an urgent need to increase the capacity of developing countries to take part in the study and monitoring of their environments through remote sensing and space-based Earth observation technologies. The Open Data Cube (ODC) provides a mechanism for efficient storage and a powerful framework for processing and analyzing satellite data. While this is ideal for scientific research, the expansive feature space can also be daunting for end-users and decision-makers who simply require a solution which provides easy exploration, analysis, and visualization of Analysis Ready Data (ARD). Utilizing innovative web-design and a modular architecture, the Committee on Earth Observation Satellites (CEOS) has created a web-based user interface (UI) which harnesses the power of the ODC yet provides a simple and familiar user experience: the CEOS Data Cube (CDC). This paper presents an overview of the CDC architecture and the salient features of the UI. In order to provide adaptability, flexibility, scalability, and robustness, we leverage widely-adopted and well-supported technologies such as the Django web framework and the AWS Cloud platform. The fully-customizable source code of the UI is available at our public repository. Interested parties can download the source and build their own UIs. The UI empowers users by providing features that assist with streamlining data preparation, data processing, data visualization, and sub-setting ARD products in order to achieve a wide variety of Earth imaging objectives through an easy to use web interface.

User Interface↗

Explainable AI for Multivariate Time Series Pattern Exploration: Latent Space Visual Analytics With Temporal Fusion Transformer and Variational Autoencoders in Power Grid Event Diagnosis

Detecting and analyzing complex patterns in multivariate time-series data is crucial for decision-making in urban and environmental system operations. However, challenges arise from the high dimensionality, intricate complexity, and interconnected nature of complex patterns, which hinder the understanding of their underlying physical processes. Existing AI methods often face limitations in interpretability, computational efficiency, and scalability, reducing their applicability in real-world scenarios. This paper proposes a novel visual analytics framework that integrates two generative AI models, Temporal Fusion Transformer (TFT) and Variational Autoencoders (VAEs), to reduce complex patterns into lower-dimensional latent spaces and visualize them in 2D using dimensionality reduction techniques such as PCA, t-SNE, and UMAP with DBSCAN. These visualizations, presented through coordinated and interactive views and tailored glyphs, enable intuitive exploration of complex multivariate temporal patterns, identifying patterns’ similarities and uncover their potential correlations for a better interpretability of the AI outputs. The framework is demonstrated through a case study on power grid signal data, where it identifies multi-label grid event signatures, including faults and anomalies with diverse root causes. Additionally, novel metrics and visualizations are introduced to validate the models and assess the performance, efficiency, and consistency of latent maps generated by VAE, which have been utilized in prior studies for latent space cartography and used as a benchmark in this study, and the emerging TFT architecture under various configurations. These analyses provide actionable insights for model parameter tuning and reliability improvements. Comparative results highlight that TFT achieves shorter run times and superior scalability to diverse time-series data shapes compared to VAE. This work advances fault diagnosis in multivariate time series, fostering explainable AI to support critical system operations.

Explainable AI↗

Photo-realistic Terrain Modeling and Visualization for Mars Exploration Rover Science Operations

Modern NASA planetary exploration missions employ complex systems of hardware and software managed by large teams of. engineers and scientists in order to study remote environments. The most complex and successful of these recent projects is the Mars Exploration Rover mission. The Computational Sciences Division at NASA Ames Research Center delivered a 30 visualization program, Viz, to the MER mission that provides an immersive, interactive environment for science analysis of the remote planetary surface. In addition, Ames provided the Athena Science Team with high-quality terrain reconstructions generated with the Ames Stereo-pipeline. The on-site support team for these software systems responded to unanticipated opportunities to generate 30 terrain models during the primary MER mission. This paper describes Viz, the Stereo-pipeline, and the experiences of the on-site team supporting the scientists at JPL during the primary MER mission.

Edwards, Laurence↗

A geo-visual analysis for exploring the socioeconomic benefits of the heating electrification using geothermal energy

In parallel to population growth and climate change, the rapid pace of urbanization worldwide has led to an enormous increase in energy demand and costs in urban areas. The subsequent energy burden has become an increasing concern for many households in the U.S. Previous studies have revealed that geothermal resources can effectively lower the electricity demand and carbon emissions in large cities. In this paper, we focus on the socioeconomic impacts of geothermal energy on urban systems by presenting an interactive visual analytics dashboard. The dashboard allows urban planners to spatially examine geothermal energy's practical benefits on energy affordability, urban livability, and resilience across the U.S. We compiled a list of socioeconomic metrics by integrating the simulation results from multiple geothermal and building models with multi-domain urban datasets (socioeconomic, demographic, and electricity utility). These metrics are created to characterize the benefits of the heating electrification of buildings using Geothermal Heat Pumps (GHP) for lowering the energy burden of middle-and low-income households nationwide. The visual dashboard employs a combination of multivariate, glyph-based, and geospatial visualization to reveal the variability and patterns in our metrics. We present a pilot study to demonstrate the GHPs' potential as a renewable and affordable solution for increasing the economic and energy grid resilience in U.S cities.

Xu, Haowen↗

Machine learning visualization tool for exploring parameterized hydrodynamics

We are interested in the computational study of shock hydrodynamics, i.e. problems involving compressible solids, liquids, and gases that undergo large deformation. These problems are dynamic and nonlinear and can exhibit complex instabilities. Due to advances in high performance computing it is possible to parameterize a hydrodynamic problem and perform a computational study yielding $\mathscr{O} (TB)$ of simulation state data. We present an interactive machine learning tool that can be used to compress, browse, and interpolate these large simulation datasets. This tool allows computational scientists and researchers to quickly visualize 'what-if' situations, perform sensitivity analyses, and optimize complex hydrodynamic experiments.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Visual odometry on the Mars Exploration Rovers

In this paper we describe the Visual Odometry algorithm used on the Mars Exploration Rovers, and summarize the results obtained by running this processing onboard during the first year of operations on Mars.

egomotion↗

What Is the Agent Doing? Visualizing Agentic AI Querying Workflows

We explore how visualizations can help users understand what an AI agent is doing as it builds and runs queries over data. As part of the LinkQ system, a natural language interface for querying knowledge graphs with a large language model (LLM), we designed two complementary views: A State Diagram that shows where the agent is within a larger workflow, and a Live Action Display that gives real-time updates about the agent's current task. In a study with 14 practitioners, we found that these visuals helped participants build stronger mental models of the agent's behavior while also increasing their confidence in the system. However, we also observed that users sometimes trusted incorrect outputs simply because the agent appeared to be doing the "right" thing. Our findings point to both the value and risk of visualizing agent behavior in interactive AI systems.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Terrain Modelling for Immersive Visualization for the Mars Exploration Rovers

Immersive environments are being used to support mission operations at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. This technology contributed to the Mars Pathfinder Mission in planning sorties for the Sojourner rover and is being used for the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) missions. The stereo imagery captured by the rovers is used to create 3D terrain models, which can be viewed from any angle, to provide a powerful and information rich immersive visualization experience. These technologies contributed heavily to both the mission success and the phenomenal level of public outreach achieved by Mars Pathfinder and MER. This paper will review the utilization of terrain modelling for immersive environments in support of MER.

immersive environments↗

Visualization techniques to aid in the analysis of multi-spectral astrophysical data sets

This report describes our project activities for the period Sep. 1991 - Oct. 1992. Our activities included stabilizing the software system STAR, porting STAR to IDL/widgets (improved user interface), targeting new visualization techniques for multi-dimensional data visualization (emphasizing 3D visualization), and exploring leading-edge 3D interface devices. During the past project year we emphasized high-end visualization techniques, by exploring new tools offered by state-of-the-art visualization software (such as AVS3 and IDL4/widgets), by experimenting with tools still under research at the Department of Computer Science (e.g., use of glyphs for multidimensional data visualization), and by researching current 3D input/output devices as they could be used to explore 3D astrophysical data. As always, any project activity is driven by the need to interpret astrophysical data more effectively.

Domik, Gitta↗

Collaborative Exploration of Scientific Datasets Using Immersive and Statistical Visualization: Preprint

We discuss the value of collaborative, immersive visualization for the exploration of scientific datasets and review techniques and tools that have been developed and deployed at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). We believe that collaborative visualizations linking statistical interfaces and graphics on laptops and high-performance computing (HPC) with 3D visualizations on immersive displays (head-mounted displays and large-scale immersive environments) enable scientific workflows that further rapid exploration of large, high-dimensional datasets by teams of analysts. We present a framework, PlottyVR, that blends statistical tools, general-purpose programming environments, and simulation with 3D visualizations. To contextualize this framework, we propose a categorization and loose taxonomy of collaborative visualization and analysis techniques. Finally, we describe how scientists and engineers have adopted this framework to investigate large, complex datasets.

collaborative visualization↗