HS3

NASA will host a Google+ Hangout from several NASA centers at 2 p.m. EDT Tuesday, July 23 as the agency prepares to fly two unmanned aircraft over Atlantic Ocean hurricanes this summer. For more information and to attend the Hangout, please go to http://www.nasa.gov/press/2013/july/nasa-to-host-google-hangout-on-hurri.... Data from the HS3 project will be available from GHRC starting next year.

The NASA Earth Venture 1 mission Hurricane and Severe Storm Sentinel (HS3) is ramping up for the 2013 hurricane season. Investigators are using two unmanned Global Hawk aircraft to monitor Atlantic tropical storms. The data collected by HS3 will be archived at and distributed by GHRC.

GHRC Operations Manager Helen Conover (UAH/ITSC) attended the annual science team meeting for Hurricane Severe Storm Sentinel (HS3), an Earth Venture 1 mission. She discussed GHRC requirements related to data formats, metadata and documentation, and presented a poster showcasing plans for the HS3 data system and soliciting ideas from the science team.

NASA's Hurricane and Severe Storm Sentinel (HS3) begins its third season of observations this week. Two unmanned Global Hawk aircraft carry instruments to monitor tropical storms and the surrounding environment to investigate the processes that underlie hurricane formation and intensity change in the Atlantic Ocean basin. Data from the HS3 mission will be archived at and available from the Global Hydrology Resource Center (GHRC). GHRC is supporting the 2014 mission by providing requested ancillary data products to the science team, including brightness temperature, cloud top height, and overshooting tops datasets from the Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies (CIMSS) at the University of Wisconsin. Also available are the Dust AOT product from NASA GSFC Global Modeling and Assimilation Office (GMAO) and the NOAA SHIPS Intensity Forecast data from the NOAA Hurricane Research Division. These data will be made publicly available when the mission datasets are released.

GHRC DAAC Manager Rahul Ramachandran (NASA/MSFC), PI Sara Graves, and developer Manil Maskey (both UAH) attended the AGU Fall Meeting in San Francisco, December 15-19. GHRC Operations Manager Helen Conover (UAH) helped organize a poster session on Airborne Data Management (IN13B), at which Maskey presented a poster entitled “Data System for HS3 Airborne Field Campaign.” Dr. Graves co-chaired a session entitled "Integration of Remote Sensing and Socioeconomic Data for Interdisciplinary Research and Applications" (PA34A) with SEDAC Manager Bob Chen. Dr. Ramachandran co-chaired "Leveraging Enabling Technologies and Architectures to Enable Data Intensive Science" (IN23E, IN21A) GHRC team members also presented a variety of GHRC-related research: Integrating a Collaborative Infrastructure with a Big Data Technology to Boost Data-analysis Productivity – Poster. Kwo-Sen Kuo, Thomas Clune, Rahul Ramachandran, John Rushing, Manil Maskey, Gyorgy Fekete, Amidu Oloso, Khoa Doan Event-Driven Cyberinfrastructure Technologies Supporting the Disaster Life Cycle – Poster. Sara Graves, Manil Maskey, Ken Keiser Data System for HS3 Airborne Field Campaign – Poster. Manil Maskey, Michael McEniry, Todd Berendes, Kaylin Bugbee, Helen Conover, Rahul Ramachandran Design of Scalable and Effective Earth Science Collaboration Tool – Presentation. Manil Maskey, Rahul Ramachandran, Kwo-Sen Kuo, Christopher Lynnes, Noppasin Niamsuwan, Chocka Chidambaram Aggregation Tool to Create Curated Data Albums to Support Disaster Recovery and Response – Presentation. Rahul Ramachandran, Ajinkya Kulkarni, Manil Maskey, Xiang Li, Shannon Flynn Cloud-Hosted Real-time Data Services for the Geosciences (CHORDS) – Presentation. Sara Graves, Frank Vernon, Branko Kerkez, Chandrasekar Chandra, Ken Keiser, Charlie Martin Progress Report on the ASCII for Science Data, Airborne and Geospatial Working Groups of the 2014 ESDSWG for MEaSUREs – Presentation. Keith Evans, Nickolay Krotkov, Chris Mattman, Maziyar Boustani, Emily Law, Helen Conover, Gao Chen, Stephen Olding, Jeff Walter Enhancements to NASA’s Land Atmosphere Near Real-Time Capability for Eos (LANCE) – Poster. Diane Davies, Kevin Murphy, Jeffrey Schmaltz, Ryan Boller, Matthew Cechini, Edward Masuoka, Gang Ye, Helen Conover, Kathryn Regner, Sherry Harrison Data-Intensive Science Meets Inquiry-Driven Pedagogy: Interactive Big Data Exploration, Threshold Concepts, and Liminality - invited. Rahul Ramachandran, Udaysankar Nair, Andrea Word.

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.

On 21 April 2015, the GHRC team met with Dr. Gerald Heymsfield, Principal Investigator for the High-Altitude Imaging Wind and Rain Airborne Profiler (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.