GHRC personnel attended the annual science team meeting for Hurricane Severe Storm Sentinel (HS3), held May 5-7 at NASA Ames Research Center. HS3 is an Earth Ventures – Suborbital 1 mission, with data to be archived at and distributed by GHRC. Manil Maskey, lead developer for the HS3 information system at GHRC, and Dr. Xiang Li, atmospheric scientist at GHRC, discussed system requirements related to data formats, metadata and documentation.

Congratulations to Evans Criswell and Lamar Hawkins!

On May 4th, 2015, at the UAH Service Awards Ceremony, Evans Criswell was recognized for 25 years of service, and Lamar Hawkins was recognized for 20 years of service.

GHRC DAAC Manager Dr. Rahul Ramachandran has submitted an article to IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Magazine:

Ramachandran, R. and S. J. S. Khalsa, “Moving from Data to Knowledge: Challenges and Opportunities,” IEEE GRSS (submitted).

On 21 April 2015, the GHRC team met with Dr. Gerald Heymsfield, Principal Investigator for the HIWRAP instrument of the NASA EV-1 Hurricane and Severe Storm Sentinel mission. The discussion focused GHRC DAAC data submission requirements, particularly CF-compliant metadata to be added to netCDF data files. Data documentation and citation were also discussed.

Preparations continue for the deployment of a second LIS instrument to the International Space Station in February 2016. GHRC personnel are working with the LIS Science Team on an algorithm and test process.

Dr. Sara Graves, UAH PI for the GHRC DAAC, attended a meeting of the Climate Change Science Institute’s Science Advisory Board (CCSI SAB) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory on April 9-10. CCSI is researching a new generation of comprehensive, high-resolution Earth system models that predict the physical, biogeochemical, and coupled chemical evolution of the climate system.

On 8 April 2015 at 14:09:36Z, the Lightning Imaging Sensor (LIS) on the TRMM satellite was powered off for the last time. The TRMM LIS mission has been recording both cloud-to-ground and intracloud lightning flashes from space since November 1997. However, preparations continue for the deployment of a second LIS instrument to the International Space Station in February 2016. LIS Level-2 lightning flash and background image datasets, as well as Level-3 climatologies, are available from GHRC.

GHRC staff members are working with the science team from the Hurricane and Severe Storm Sentinel (HS3) Earth Ventures – Suborbital 1 mission to define data and metadata formats and structures conforming to the netCDF (network Common Data Form) / CF (Climate and Forecast) data and metadata standard. For five of the six HS3 instruments, PI-provided sample data files have been augmented as needed for netCDF/CF compliance and returned to the PIs for review.

GHRC has deployed a new OPeNDAP / THREDDS Data Server as part of the Big Earth Data Initiative (BEDI). Initially, 44 datasets from the TRMM Lightning Imaging Sensor (LIS) mission and DISCOVER MEaSUREs project are available via this service.

LIS/OTD lightning climatology is featured on the NASA Earth Observatory Image Of The Day for March 31! You can view it at http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov.
In case you miss it, you will be able to view it after March 31 at http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=85600&eocn=home&eoci=iotd_readmore.