State of the Oceans: A Satellite Data Processing System for Visualizing Near Real-Time Imagery on Google Earth

The State of the Oceans (SOTO) web tool was developed at NASA's Physical Oceanography Distributed Active Archive Center (PO.DAAC) at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) as an interactive means for users to visually explore and assess ocean-based geophysical parameters extracted from the latest archived data products. The SOTO system consists of four extensible modules, a data polling tool, a preparation and imaging package, image server software, and the graphical user interface. Together, these components support multi-resolution visualization of swath (Level 2) and gridded Level 3/4) data products as either raster- or vector- based KML layers on Google Earth. These layers are automatically updated periodically throughout the day. Current parameters available include sea surface temperature, chlorophyll concentration, ocean winds, sea surface height anomaly, and sea surface temperature anomaly. SOTO also supports mash-ups, allowing KML feeds from other sources to be overlaid directly onto Google Earth such as hurricane tracks and buoy data. A version of the SOTO software has also been installed at Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) to support the Land Atmosphere Near real-time Capability for EOS (LANCE). The State of the Earth (SOTE) has similar functionality to SOTO but supports different data sets, among them the MODIS 250m data product.