HR: 16:15h
AN: SF34A-02    [Abstracts]
TI: A Spatial Portal for Accessing NOAA's Observing Systems
AU: * Fox, C G
EM: Christopher.G.Fox@noaa.gov
AF: NOAA, National Geophysical Data Center, 325 Broadway, Boulder, CO 80305 United States
AU: Habermann, T
EM: Ted.Habermann@noaa.gov
AF: NOAA, National Geophysical Data Center, 325 Broadway, Boulder, CO 80305 United States
AU: Stroker, K J
EM: Kelly.Stroker@noaa.gov
AF: University of Colorado, CIRES, 325 Broadway, E/GC1, Boulder, CO 80305 United States
AB: The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) monitors the earth environment with tens of thousands of sensors in over one hundred observing systems, ranging from satellites to marine sonars to human observations of marine mammal populations. In 2003, NOAA initiated its first-ever comprehensive review of these diverse observing systems and their interrelationships to create the baseline NOAA Observing System Architecture (NOSA). The baseline NOSA was constructed with the assistance of all research and operational observing system managers within NOAA. It includes information about observing system owners, purposes, requirements and costs. The locations of these observing systems have been incorporated into a single geospatial database managed by NOAA's National Geophysical Data Center. This database supports several web tools for exploring these observing systems. First, an interactive map allows users to locate observing systems in a particular area and do simple spatial queries involving several observing systems (i.e. find all observatories from observing system A that are within 50km of observatories from observing system B). The map also provides links to observing system home pages and to data pages for specific observatories if they are available. A "Find Your Place" tool enables users to locate observatories in selected geographic regions (e.g., by ecoregion, watershed, state, congressional district), and a "Web Image Slide Tray" provides quick access to simple maps that make it easy to compare coverage of different observing systems in a given state or region. These tools and more information about the NOSA project are available from http://nosa.noaa.gov.
UR: http://nosa.noaa.gov
DE: 9820 Techniques applicable in three or more fields
DE: 6344 System operation and management
DE: 1694 Instruments and techniques
DE: 1640 Remote sensing
SC: Special Focus: Advances in Data Acquisition, Management, Analysis and Display [SF]
MN: 2004 AGU Fall Meeting