Response 3

Richard:

I was forwarded the message below by James Famiglietti, an academic colleague from the University of California, Irvine, who works with remotely sensed data. I have looked at the documents you list below and I think they are very relevant to the work that Dr Famiglietti, I, and others are doing in trying to achieve data interoperability for the hydrologic science community. You may be aware of an organization called CUAHSI (Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc), an association representing 120 US universities which is supported by the National Science Foundation to advance hydrologic science in the nation’s universities. http://www.cuahsi.org tells more about CUAHSI.

I am the leader of the CUAHSI Hydrologic Information System project, also funded by the National Science Foundation, whose goal is to provide better data access to students, researchers and faculty who do hydrologic science http://his.cuahsi.org tells more about HIS. We have developed WaterML as a standardized language for transmitting through the internet water observations data (streamflow, precipitation, water quality, groundwater levels) measured at point locations, and the USGS has adopted WaterML and is publishing some of its time series data using this approach. We are also working with the Open Geospatial Consortium and the World Meteorological Organization on forming a Domain Working Group in hydrology that will help to "harmonize" WaterML with OGC standards.

During 2009, we are starting to build “HIS Desktop” illustrated in the attached slide, and one of the data sources that we would like to provide access to is remote sensing. I have to say that of all 5 of the types of data illustrated in the slide (climate and weather, GIS, water observations, modeling, and remote sensing) it is the remote sensing data that have been the most elusive to date.

I understand very well the issues you raise about the time aggregation of geospatial grids and have been working with Steve Ansari at the National Climatic Data Center to work out how to publish these effectively using the THREDDS server. He has time aggregated daily Nexrad files (about a million cells spatially) for a year and we’ve found this works pretty effectively.

I was recently at WMO in Geneva and learned about the GEO secretariat there and the GEOSS program. What we have done with water observations is something like a water system of systems and via GEOSS, or by working directly with NASA, I’d very much like to work out how we can make remote sensing data accessible to our HIS Desktop application and more generally accessible to the CUAHSI community.

Best regards