MeaSURES Program Data Ingest Process at the NSIDC

The National Snow and Ice Data Center Distributed Active Archive Center (NSIDC DAAC) manages and distributes cryosphere related data from NASA's Earth Observing Satellites, validation campaigns supporting assigned satellite missions, a variety of historical data of import to our users, and more recently data sets developed by the research community under the NASA Making Earth Science Data Records for Use in Research Environments (MEaSUREs) Program. The latter data sets pose unique challenges for the NSIDC DAAC since the requirements for system sizing, the access services required, and the expected level of use by the scientific user community are not well specified in advance. As a consequence, systems planning and to a certain extent the budget planning process become more complicated.

We have addressed these challenges by establishing procedures to help us evaluate these new data streams, both for systems and staff planning but more importantly to determine an appropriate level of service and scientific priority for each data set. Our aim is to assure our users and stakeholders that we are allocating our resources optimally, with the highest priority data receiving the most attention.

This paper will present the processes we have developed, discuss our experiences to date, and offer our plans for the future.