As the focus of current and future environmental satellite missions migrates towards providing common production oriented products, access to routine monitoring and assessment of these products must also evolve from a closed system centralized at a single site to an open system that provides common access to a larger community. This community consists of not only those involved in daily production, but also those involved in problem resolution as well as the end users of these data. This evolution would not only enable, if desired, the geographic diversification of those involved in the daily assessment of product quality, but also provide a standardized interface for rapid access to common data for an extended group in the event of a problem. In addition, these same tools and standards could provide to end users of the data as common methods of assessing the applicability of a given product(s) to their application whether they be at an international, national or regional scale. In order to facilitate this transition from a centralized activity to a community based approach, common and open source standards and tools must be adopted to facilitate visual inspection and comparison of a given product with those from other satellite-based systems and ground-based measurements.

This work presents the prototype development of a set of interactive networked enabled tools for visual comparison and inter-comparison of satellite-based remote sensed products from multiple platforms/sensors as well as ground based in situ measurements. This prototype provides both common interfaces to standardized data products via interactive web browser applications and other open source GIS-like applications, e.g. Google Earth/Google Map technologies. These tool enable routine product inspection and quality monitoring via access to production quality data from a variety of sources including products generated in-house as well as those provided by government agencies, i.e. NOAA/NASA, and in situ measurements form national/international network feeds, i.e. METARs/BUOYs.