Developing a Cross-Institutional Open-Source Cyberinfrastructure to Explore, Analyze, and Communicate Greenhouse Gas Data and Information

The NASA Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) Information System Development and Integration team of the new U.S. Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Center is working to build a multi-agency data and information system. The U.S. GHG Center agency partners currently include the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), with plans to include other governmental and non-governmental stakeholders. The initial four partners collectively have a wide variety of data pertaining to GHGs, and the new US GHG Center aims to bring together the latest and most relevant of these to provide a holistic picture of the types of GHG data available and to educate on how this data can be used to better understand GHG emissions, sinks, and the role of GHGs on the climate. The data featured by the U.S. GHG Center is focused on three primary demonstration areas: Access anthropogenic GHG emission inventories; Better understand natural GHG sources and sinks, fluxes, and patterns; and Identify and quantify large methane emission leak events identified from the latest aircraft and space-borne measurement capabilities. The data provided via the GHG Center is open and available for anyone - from the general public to advanced researchers who would like to learn about and study GHGs and their impact on our climate. The US GHG Center web portal, which is currently under development, offers discovery, interactive visualization, exploration, and analysis of GHG data in a user-friendly, fully cloud-native environment.

The current system supporting the GHG Center is designed to be fully integrated in a cloud environment. Therefore, in order for data to be visualized, explored, and analyzed, it is first converted into cloud native format and then registered in a Spatial Temporal Asset Catalog (STAC). The data is prepared in five steps: acquisition, transformation, validation, ingestion, and publication. This presentation aims to provide a more comprehensive explanation of this process and highlight the challenges and opportunities associated with integrating data and information from various sources into the GHG Center system. The presentation will spotlight the decisions behind the construction design and the novel functionalities created to enhance the scope of data analysis. Additionally, it will elucidate the continuous endeavors directed towards establishing more automated and transparent procedures for data governance.