Nimbus-era Satellite Data Recovery at the NASA GES DISC
Abstract
This presentation is about the recovery of NASA Nimbus satellite data by the Goddard Earth Science Data and Information Services Center (GES DISC). NASA launched a series of seven Nimbus meteorological satellites between 1964 and 1978, providing remote sensing observations of the Earth for about 30 years. These satellites carried instruments which observed the Earth in the visible, infrared, ultraviolet, and microwave wavelengths, revolutionized weather forecasting, provided early observations of land, oceans and the atmosphere, and prototyped location-based search and rescue capabilities. The Nimbus satellites were the forerunners of a number of currently operational systems such as NASA's EOS Terra, Aqua and Aura platforms and NOAA's Polar Satellites, including NPP and JPSS.
The original data were archived on magnetic tapes and on film media. These media are well past their expected end of life, thus placing at risk valuable data which can be used to understand the Earth system and extending climate records back into the 1960s and 70s. The GES DISC has been archiving these data into a modern online archive by recovering the digital data files from the tapes, and scanning images of the data from film strips. The digital data products were written long ago on obsolete hardware systems, using outdated file formats, without any metadata to describe the data files, and using proprietary file structures unique to each data product. Through a tedious, laborious, and often manual process, oft-corrupted data have been recovered, and incomplete metadata and documentation reconstructed. A process using OCR software was developed to read the scanned imagery to extract metadata, as each image has no information describing itself, except for headers within the images themselves.- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2019
- Bibcode:
- 2019AGUFMED21A..08J
- Keywords:
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- 1912 Data management;
- preservation;
- rescue;
- INFORMATICS;
- 1916 Data and information discovery;
- INFORMATICS