ACCESS to Terra Data Fusion Products

Larry Di Girolamo, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Usage Details

David Raila, Gregory Daues, Kent Muqun Yang, Guangyu Zhao, Larry Di Girolamo, Sean Stevens, Dongwei Fu, Yi Wang, Yizhe Zhan

The Terra satellite is the flagship of NASA's Earth Observing System. Data from its five instruments reside at different data centers in different file formats and projections and total ~1 petabyte. This non-uniformity and geographic distribution makes it impractical to address many Earth Science questions. Here, we initiated the Terra Data Fusion Project through collaborative efforts between NASA, Hierarchical Data Format (HDF) Group, and NCSA. Large Terra data transfers involving the Blue Waters team and NASA resulted in improvements to NASA's cyberinfrastructure. The data was used to (1) characterize drop size distribution of liquid water clouds over the oceans, revealing enormous positive biases (2 to 11 μm in zonal means) in drop sizes relative to previous satellite-based knowledge, and (2) examine decadal trends in Earth's color and texture, producing the first climatological color and texture maps of the Earth, and showing that the Earth has been getting bluer and smoother over the Terra record.