Spatial Tools for a Round Planet

For many geophysical disciplines it is sufficient, and often expedient, to treat the Earth as a Cartesian plane, at least for data search and order purposes. Unfortunately the Earth is round and the majority of Earth Science data is being gathered by satellite born sensors circling the Earth in polar orbits. As the number of sensors increases, and the resolution of those sensors increases, the shear volume of the available data has made the flat Earth paradigm increasingly problematic. Cryospheric Science is one discipline that is ill-served by the flat Earth paradigm so the National Snow and Ice Data Center has been working with the sphere for quite some time. We have found that treating the Earth as a sphere significantly increases spatial search accuracy for many data types and consequently can be of equal, or even greater, benefit to scientists working in the tropics and mid-latitudes. This poster describes a number of Java tools we have developed to make working with the sphere easier on both sides (client and server) of data search and order systems.