Data Visualization and Analysis for Climate Studies Using NASA Giovanni Online System

With the many global earth observation systems and missions, focused on climate systems, and the associated large volumes of observational data available for exploring and explaining how climate is changing and why, there is an urgent need for climate services infrastructure. Giovanni, the NASA GES DISC Interactive Online Visualization ANd ANalysis Infrastructure, is a simple-to-use yet powerful tool for research on and application of global warming and climate change, as well as their impacts on such areas as weather, air quality, agriculture, and water resources. Giovanni is an online data system with a remarkable capability for data exploration, basic research, and exemplary data visualization, utilizing data from many different NASA Earth observation missions. With these long-term, high resolution and widely available data sets, including parameters such as temperature, precipitation, and greenhouse gases (water vapor, methane, carbon dioxide, and ozone), Giovanni provides capabilities to facilitate climate change and global warming research. Examples include the computation and visualization of long-term means; the analysis of time series and trends; the study of inter-annual and intra- annual variabilities; and the identification and study of extreme events (e.g., hurricanes, floods, droughts, El Nino, La Nina). In addition to images, Giovanni also provides the output data in ASCII, HDF, NetCDF, and KML formats, and exports output images to Google Earth. Giovanni has proven to be a highly successful and popular climate services infrastructure that is significantly contributing to the study of global warming and climate change and their social, political, economic, and environmental issues that affect all of us on this planet.