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About the NASA Langley Atmospheric Sciences Data Center |
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The Atmospheric Sciences Data Center (ASDC) at NASA Langley Research Center is responsible for the processing, archival, and distribution of NASA Earth science data in the areas of radiation budget, clouds, aerosols, and tropospheric chemistry. The Data Center was established in 1991 to support the Earth Observing System (EOS) as part of NASA's Earth Science enterprise and the U.S. Global Change Research Program, and is one of several Distributed Active Archive Centers (DAACs) sponsored by NASA as part of the Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS). The Data Center specializes in atmospheric data important to understanding the causes and processes of global climate change and the consequences of human activities on the climate. The ASDC currently supports more than 35 projects and has over 800 archived data sets. Data production primarily occurs on three Origin 3800 systems with over 200 CPUs and 100 GB of memory. The current data archive volume is almost 1 Petabyte and this volume increases daily. Available data products include several from the NASA Langley’s satellite programs such as the Stratospheric Aerosol and Gas Experiment (SAGE) missions, the Earth Radiation Budget Experiment (ERBE), and the Clouds and the Earth's Radiant Energy System (CERES) program; from Langley’s satellite-derived Surface meteorology and Solar Energy (SSE) data set; and from Langley’s field experiments such as the Global Tropospheric Experiment (GTE) and the First International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project Regional Experiment (FIRE). Available data products also include those from EOS instruments such as the Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer (MISR), Measurements Of Pollution In The Troposphere (MOPITT), and the Active Cavity Radiometer Irradiance Monitor (ACRIM III) projects. Future data products include the Tropospheric Emission Spectrometer (TES), the Cloud-Aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observations (CALIPSO), and the Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO) projects. All ASDC data are available to the public from the Access Data web page. Detailed information about the data products, including documentation, ordering tools, and tools for working with the data, are available for each project ASDC supports. Some of the data products include web interfaces that allow direct access to the data holdings for immediate downloading, for placing media orders, or for ordering prepackaged CD-ROMs and videocassettes. ASDC customers include scientists; researchers; federal, state, and local governments; educational and commercial professionals; application users; the commercial remote sensing community; and the general public. |
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