Web Tools and Services For Subsetting and Visualizing Swath Data

The Physical Oceanography Distributed Active Archive Center (PO.DAAC) at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) is NASA’s designated archive for satellite-based measurements pertaining to the physical state of the ocean. In addition to the data itself, PO.DAAC strives to provide tools and services that allow its users to efficiently discover, assess, select, and pull Level 2 swath and Level 3 gridded data products from its archive. We present two new tools facilitating data access, a Level 2 subsetter and a KML image generator. The Level 2 Subsetter, a collaborative development effort with the French Research Institute for Exploitation of the Sea (Ifremer), is a tool consisting of a collection of distributable web services and an accompanying web graphical user interface that enables all levels of users to search for, visualize, and subset Level 2 swath data products via spatial, temporal, and data-specific constraints, all accomplished without any dependencies on satellite orbital parameters. The KML Image Generator allows users of geobrowsers such as Google Earth to create imagery that is dynamically scaled and resampled based upon a geobrowser’s current spatial extent and zoom level.