NASA鈥檚 climatologists have an enormous problem: when it comes to data on the atmosphere, they have too much of it.
To help understand climate change, NASA has created its Earth Observing System (EOS), made up of a dozen satellites plus a host of weather balloons and ground-based sensors that collect data such as air temperatures, water-vapour densities and aerosol concentrations. Terabytes of such measurements have been streaming in each day, and the agency was quickly swamped with so much data that all it could do was dump it on disc drives.
Now it has hit on a simple way to make that data accessible: software that superimposes it on the global 3D maps provided by Google Earth.
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Called iEarth, the NASA software scours EOS databanks for information and converts it into a file that can be viewed via Google Earth. Choosing a spot on the planet鈥檚 surface will prompt iEarth to display ground-based measurements for that location, as well as data relating to the atmosphere and space above it.
鈥淭his is the first time we鈥檝e been able to do multi-instrument atmospheric science,鈥� says Brian Wilson of NASA鈥檚 Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, who demonstrated a prototype of iEarth at this week鈥檚 meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. 鈥淵ou can pick a specific spot on the planet and, starting with the surface, move up in altitude through the troposphere and stratosphere,鈥� he says.
The iEarth system will be available for anyone to use in April, NASA says.
