Field Experiment Data Support at the Goddard DAAC

Historically, field experiment data support at the data center level has been sketchy, but in the last decade, because of rapid growth of electronic capabilities throughout the science community, the data center has become the resolution of choice to the problems of campaign data distribution and archival. Even so, field campaign data, being inherently non-uniform, require significant adaptation on the part of the archive. The participant complement for a campaign ranges widely-from one to three dozen investigators. Each has his/her own instrument, organizational affiliation, and funding. Many are academics with class schedules to consider, an office staff composed of graduate students and a correspondingly high turnover rate. Some are operating with very limited resources and lack the programming staff to tailor their data to archive specifications. Data delivery schedules, formatting and documentation are all driven by these factors. Planning for data volume also requires flexibility. Campaign data acquisition is sensitive to weather and a variety of logistical problems. Planning for campaign data volume is therefore a matter of determining thresholds. Since most campaign data sets tend to be small by data center standards, distribution is mainly from anonymous ftp sites front-ended by web sites. The Goddard DAAC opened its campaign archive in 1994 with data from the TRMM oriented TOGA-COARE campaign of 1992-93, and has most recently archived the TRMM global validation campaigns, designed to evaluate the physical assumptions made by TRMM rainfall algorithms, initialize and validate the cloud resolving models, test latent heating retrievals from TRMM measurements, and evaluate methods to estimate rainfall and latent heating from ground based radars. Launched by the TRMM Office in 1998, the TRMM campaigns were designed as a group so that specific measurements could be compared between experiments in order to gain insight into the regional dependence of any findings. The Goddard DAAC's campaign complement now stands at nine and includes the five TRMM campaigns, an instrument archive for the MODIS Airborne Simulator (MAS), and the Southern Great Plains Soil Hydrology campaigns of 1997 and 1999. >http://daac.gsfc.nasa.gov/CAMPAIGN_DOCS/field_experiments/ field_main.html</a>