Abstract
The NASA EOS Mission to Planet Earth (MTPE) will be both an opportunity and a challenge to visualization and analysis tool developers. The EOS Data and Information System (EOSDIS) will gather, process, and archive a terabyte (TB) of earth science data per day. Because of the size of the EOSDIS program and the size and diversity of the global change community, technical decisions and standards adopted by EOSDIS should have a significant impact on the earth science, geographic information systems (GIS), and visualization development communities as a whole. NASA is working to encourage and assist commercial and other outside tool developers to create or refine visual analysis tools to meet the demands of the large global change research community by providing necessary libraries and application program interfaces (API). In order to simplify data ingest, EOSDIS has adopted the hierarchical data format (HDF) as a standard for most, if not all, EOS data. EOSDIS will provide developers with standard APIs for accessing and understanding the wide variety of data and metadata within EOSDIS data sets. Many existing visualization tools have inadequate capabilities for locating data within geographic and temporal domains. Standards are being established and libraries developed which will allow developers to provide capabilities for navigating, geolocating, and projecting both low-level orbital-swath data and projected/gridded data within their tools.
