Preprints of the Metadiversity Conference Proceedings

  Session 3: The Challenge in Earth Observation, Ecosystem Monitoring, and Environmental Information

The Committee on Earth Observation Satellites Working Group on Information Systems and Services

GERALD BARTON, Physical Scientist with the NOAA Environmental Services Data and Information Management Program (ESDIM)

I am going to talk about the Committee on Earth Observation Satellites (CEOS), with a focus on the Working Group on Information Systems and Services (WGISS). This was a requested talk to show the international aspect of what we are doing in data management.

Who We Are

I am with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). NOAA has many parts. I am associated with the National Environmental Satellite Data and Information Service. For those of you in the United States, we bring you the weather satellite pictures that come to you every day. NOAA also includes the National Weather Service and the National Marine Fishing Service.

A lot of biological work goes on at the NOAA National Ocean Service, particularly in the coastal environments.

There also is the Committee on Earth Observation Satellites (CEOS), which addresses the coordination of satellite-Earth observation programs of government agencies around the world. The kinds of satellites we are talking about here are the weather satellites, the Landsat kind of satellites, radar satellites, and so on–not specifically the communication satellites.

The Working Group on Information Systems and Services

The Working Group on Information Systems and Services (WGISS) is a working group of CEOS that helps the agencies achieve coordination and enables ease-of-access by users and potential users to the Earth observation data held by people around the world. CEOS itself was started in 1984. The group recognized the multidisciplinary nature of satellite-Earth observation and the value of coordinating international mission plans. It now has a broad framework for coordination across all space-born Earth observation missions. The WGISS was established as a CEOS working group. (There actually was a working group on data that existed for a long time. It was changed to WGISS just for a different focus and to reestablish things in 1995.)

One primary objective of the WGISS is to optimize benefits of space-born Earth observations, especially through cooperation in planning and the development of data products, formats, services, applications and policies. (This involves lots of data management.) Another objective is to aid members in the international user community by serving as the focal point for international coordination of space-related Earth observation activities, especially those related to global change, and to exchange policy and technical information to encourage compatibility among space-born Earth observation systems currently in service, as well as among the data received from them. So, it is not only to coordinate what is going to be done and how the Earth is going to be observed with different satellites, but it is also to use the data from the satellites.

The WGISS has grown to encompass the agencies responsible for Earth observation programs along with agencies that receive and process data. It also includes other organizations, such as the World Meteorological Organization Global Climate Observing System, which now has affiliate status in the CEOS. These other organizations are actually incorporated into the CEOS as affiliate members and attend meetings both at the plenary level–there is a plenary meeting in India quite soon–and also at the coordination-group level and at the WGISS levels and at the working group levels.

Approximately 40 Earth observation missions have been launched since the establishment of CEOS. Fifty more are planned for launch within the next five years, and a further 16 are already planned for the following five years. So, there is a lot of coordination involved. The points of contact for the Secretariat are at the European Space Agency (ESA) in Paris, in Japan, and Tokyo. There are many international aspects to this.

Subgroups of WGISS

There are three subgroups within WGISS. There is a Data Subgroup, there is a Network Subgroup, and there is an Access Subgroup.

The Data Subgroup is there to enhance the complementarity, interoperability, and standardization of Earth observation data, and to undertake tasks to foster the inner use of data, ensuring compatibility of data content, formats, and tools used in the generation of the data products. So, this group gets down to the nitty-gritty of the data, how things are transferred, what things should look like, and what the fields should contain.

The purpose of the Network Subgroup is to provide coordination and cooperation on network architecture for electronic access to Earth-observation data worldwide. An example of what happened recently as a result of this group’s efforts is the establishment of high-speed networks between Japan and the U.S. to enable transmission of satellite data back and forth. This network effectively got rid of the delay you usually experience when you are addressing information on another continent. For example, I was just over in Japan two weeks ago for a CEOS meeting, and access to information in the U.S. was just as if I were in the U.S.

The Access Subgroup–the main work of data and information management–is the WGISS group itself. We have two major goals for the WGISS. The first goal is that it enable Earth-observation data and information services to be more accessible to data providers and data users worldwide, especially through international coordination. The second goal is that it take into account the requirements of users and CEOS participants and undertakes tasks to develop or demonstrate improved methods and tools for locating, advertising, accessing, and exchanging information. In the process of achieving these goals it serves as an international forum about the development and operation of catalogue systems and catalogue system elements.

Task Teams

A number of task teams also exist. Just to show you the diversity of the topics, the CEOS International Directory Network is a service that is available worldwide. The Global Change Master Directory is replicated in two other locations on the globe–one in Italy at the European Space Agency and one at the Japanese Space Agency in Japan. They are complete replicates. The original idea was that users in different parts of the world could save the communication time by going to the location that is closer.

There also are coordinating nodes and a number of cooperating nodes. My NOAA directorate is a cooperating node. The Canadian Center for Remote Sensing (CCRS) also is a cooperating node. In fact, there are many of them around the world, so people can get to the different directories on the International Directory Network.

The CEOS Interoperability Extension is a testbed for catalogue interoperability techniques and protocols. It allows various browse techniques so you can get samples of data and actually look at them online.

Land Stations

Land stations can sense one kilometer when the satellite is overhead. It was an international effort to go to those land sensing sites that get the one-kilometer data, to assemble the data at a few locations, and to have that as a data set that goes over time so that you can look at all the land surfaces over the Earth over time.

One of the archives is at the USGS Data Center in Sioux Falls, S.D. It is a very, very nice project. You can get vegetation data there for areas around the world and retrieve it in a time-series way.

Other Features

I want to also mention the International Global Observation Strategy (IGOS), on which CEOS is working. There are six areas for the six pilot programs. Another project we are doing in NOAA under Helen Wood, who was the former chair of WGISS, is a pilot project on natural disasters. There is a nice homepage for it that looks at hurricanes, at flooding, at fires, and so on.

CEOS also has a CD-ROM. In an example, the CD-ROM showed a city’s development over time. It showed population-growth and land-use changes for a 20-year period in a geographic GIS database and also with satellite data superimposed upon it. It also has case studies that talk about the science of remote sensing. It has data sets. It has satellite systems. And it has lesson plans on it, which is very nice. You can do it by location. You can do it by topic. There has been a lot of work in this area using Landsat data and other remote-sensing data through some of the international groups. There is another CD-ROM, too, that is being developed in India, and that CD-ROM will be more a tutorial CD-ROM and a demonstration of both Earth observing satellites or satellite remote sensing data as well as GIS data. These CD-ROMs demonstrate capabilities using satellite data.

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