Advancing Suborbital Metadata in the NASA CMR to Facilitate Open and Versatile (re)Discovery and (re)Use of Airborne and Field Observations

As the Earth’s physical systems and processes evolve and change, the irreplaceable nature of observational data highlights their increasing value. This is particularly the case for data collected via in-the-field, airborne, ship, vehicular, and/or other non-satellite platforms. We present ongoing efforts to update metadata infrastructure in the NASA Earth Science Common Metadata Repository (CMR) to enable rediscovery and reuse of suborbital data for new and future science.

These data are multipurpose: often sensors planned for satellite missions begin as airborne prototypes, suborbital observations are critical for spaceborne sensor validation, and in situ observations support an array of physical process studies. In contrast to satellite-based data, suborbital observations are typically underutilized following the end of science team funding for the airborne or field campaigns governing their collection. Responding to community needs, NASA has developed multiple data search and discovery solutions that specifically enable users to find, access, and use data collected over NASA’s decades-long history of airborne and field investigations. Two illustrative examples are the Catalog of Archived Suborbital Earth Science Investigations (CASEI) and the Sub-Orbital Order Tool (SOOT).

CASEI provides an integrated, relational view of contextual metadata, enabling intuitive exploration of agency data archives, as well as descriptive information critical for data reuse. Spanning all science domains supported by the CMR, CASEI is not limited by discipline-specific alignments that historically have organized the agency’s Distributed Active Archive Centers (DAACs). Building CASEI, which has been in full public release since July 2023, required the development of a versatile data model to support decades of field campaigns for a variety of science domains.

SOOT is a novel data discovery, order, and subsetting service built by NASA’s Atmospheric Science Data Center (ASDC) to enable advanced data findability, access, and download based on a selection of variables, spatiotemporal bounds, and/or other criteria. At present, SOOT’s capability is available only for data archived by the ASDC - not across all DAACs. However, the tool has the capability to support all data as long as the applicable metadata fields are present.

These resources demonstrate important augmentations to metadata maintained in the CMR, allowing the representation of complex and nuanced non-satellite data. We will present progress from ongoing collaborations, with a focus on the CASEI, SOOT, and CMR teams, to identify challenges, potential approaches, and solutions for aligning multi-level metadata schemas for a holistic-yet-nimble implementation for the CMR to foster open rediscovery and reuse, thus extending return on decades of NASA investments.