NASA's Atmospheric Science Data Center at the NASA Langley Research Center has developed a new state-of-the-art data processing, archival, and distribution system to serve the atmospheric sciences data provider and user communities. The new system, called Archive – Next Generation (ANGe), is replacing two large-scale science data management systems, and is designed with a distributed, multi-tier, serviced-based, message oriented architecture enabling new methods for searching, accessing, and customizing data. The previous two systems required that a user be actively managing a session in a web browser to sequentially search for and order data. The ANGe system is architected to allow programmatic calls to the archive via web services to obtain multiple data sets of interest to the user. Web service access to the archive enhances the user's ability to utilize multiple data sets managed at different locations via a Grid computing environment. This technology distributes computationally intensive data processing for large data sets, and greatly improves the efficiency of subsetting data of interest to a specific study. The Atmospheric Science Data Center is also producing custom value-added data products and tailoring access to information and data to meet the needs of a diverse user community. Details of these new data access tools and capabilities, planned enhancements, and an overview of the data archive will be discussed.

The Atmospheric Science Data Center in Langley's Science Directorate leads NASA's program for the processing, archival and distribution of Earth science data in the areas of radiation budget, clouds, aerosols, and tropospheric chemistry. The Data Center was established in 1991 to support NASA's Earth Observing System and the U.S. Global Change Research Program. It is unique among NASA data centers in the size of its archive, cutting edge computing technology, and full range of data services.