NASA Near Real-time Polar Imagery Services

[jschmaltz]

NASA's Global Imagery Browse Services (GIBS, http://earthdata.nasa.gov/gibs) was developed to provide highly responsive, scalable, and expandable imagery services using Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Web Map Tile Service (WMTS) standards.

Currently, there are more than a dozen MODIS imagery products available in polar stereographic projections for each pole, including four daily one kilometer 11 micron thermal infrared band images during all seasons. Imagery back to mid-2013 is currently available and reprocessing of imagery from the entire MODIS record is underway and community input is being solicited on recommendations for additional imagery layers from MODIS and other NASA instruments.

Here is the GIBS web examples page in GitHub:

https://github.com/nasa-gibs/gibs-web-examples

And some live examples:

https://earthdata.nasa.gov/labs/gibs/examples/leaflet/arctic-epsg3413.html
https://earthdata.nasa.gov/labs/gibs/examples/leaflet/time.html

Examples of the ability to retrieve imagery via scripts:

https://wiki.earthdata.nasa.gov/display/GIBS/GIBS+API+for+Developers#GIBSAPIforDevelopers-Script-levelAccessviaGDAL

I would like to give a brief demo of the imagery layers and access methods.

[rboller]

GIBS is also used by Worldview (https://earthdata.nasa.gov/labs/worldview/), an open source (https://github.com/nasa-gibs/worldview) map client built to interactively browse satellite imagery. Imagery can then be downloaded as GeoTIFF to allow import into GIS tools; alternatively, the underlying data can be downloaded as HDF.

Ex. 1: Terra/MODIS true color reflectance showing sea ice near northern Greenland:
http://1.usa.gov/1CqoDWU

Ex. 2: Aqua/AMSR-E sea ice concentration in Arctic:
http://1.usa.gov/1CqpGGy

Ex. 3: Terra/MODIS snow cover in Antarctic:
http://1.usa.gov/1ocCAXO

[chrismattmann]

Thanks @jschmaltz and @rboller this sounds really awesome. I think it would be sweet to figure out how Apache Tika could play into these services now since TIKA-605 is now committed and Tika natively supports GDAL, including exposing GDAL as a web service.

[rboller]

@chrismattmann - so if Tika could parse GIBS metadata and know how to access its imagery, a search engine could theoretically display imagery to a query like, "MODIS imagery for Petermann glacier calving"? That search engine would of course also have to know where Petermann glacier is and when the calving occurred.

[chrismattmann]

@rboller yep, what does GIBS metadata look like (what file format is it?) And yes, that's exactly what a search engine could do..so fronting GIBS with Tika would really help!

[rboller]

@chrismattmann that's awesome. GIBS metadata currently consists of simple stuff in the WMTS GetCapabilities request (e.g. http://map1.vis.earthdata.nasa.gov/wmts-arctic/1.0.0/WMTSCapabilities.xml) which includes available layers, extents, time ranges, map projections, color maps, etc. We will eventually have more detailed visualization metadata available in ECHO/CMR which will include linkages to data products, provenance, etc.

[nordurljos]

This sounds like a great session. I'm really new to this stuff, so I'd like to learn more about being able to access live data, particularly for Suomi NPP's day/night band and near constant contrast products available through NASA's Direct Readout Laboratory.

More info: http://directreadout.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/

[rboller]

@nordurljos sounds great. Our products are similar to those which the Direct Readout Lab produces, though have global coverage at the cost of a bit more latency (it's about 3-4 hours from observation to availability). We also don't have S-NPP products available yet (with the exception of a static, cloud-free "Earth at Night 2012" layer) but plan to add them in the future.

For a full list of currently available products in GIBS, see here:
https://wiki.earthdata.nasa.gov/display/GIBS/GIBS+Available+Imagery+Products

[chrismattmann]

Thanks for the more details @rboller

[nordurljos]

Spotting ships in the Arctic with S-NPP VIIRS' Day/Night band:
http://rammb.cira.colostate.edu/projects/alaska/blog/?p=74

[flamingbear]

Thanks @nordurljos

[lewismc]

https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/TIKA-1616
@chrismattmann @rboller

[chrismattmann]

Sounds awesome @lewismc. The GDAL parser from http://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/TIKA-605 should support WCS and WMS endpoints can you scope?