Enabling Aircraft Data Standards and Interoperability through Inter-agency Cooperation and Development

Currently, aircraft data standards vary greatly across institutions leading to decreased interoperability of systems using these data, and increased difficulties with intercomparisons. We will describe interagency collaborations to develop standards for sharing and storing aircraft data. Efforts are underway at the National Center for Atmospheric Research/ Earth Observing Laboratory (NCAR/EOL) to deploy software tools for use across agencies for visualization, comparison, and analysis of these data.

The Inter-agency Working Group for Airborne Data and Telecommunication Systems (IWGADTS) was organized in January 2005 for the purpose of developing recommendations leading to increased interoperability amongst airborne platforms and instrument payloads. As a member of this group, NCAR/EOL has helped to develop and deploy real-time, airborne platform standards in the form of the IWG1 packet which has received wide interagency adoption. The IWG1 is a small data packet for real-time distribution of navigation and state parameter data to the research instrumentation aboard an aircraft.

The Global Organization for Earth System Science Portals ( GO-ESSP ) is a collaboration designed to develop a new generation of software infrastructure that will provide distributed access to observed and simulated data from the climate and weather communities. NCAR/EOL and IWGADTS have contributed to the development of standards for the application and use of netCDF and CF conventions as archival data standards in these communities. NCAR/EOL also continues to develop and support community-available software to access, ingest, and visualize data using this standard archival format.

Finally, there are ongoing efforts to convert legacy aircraft datasets currently in obsolete formats (e.g. GENPRO) to current standards. NCAR plans to maintain community access to these legacy data through an automated data archival access page and download tools. The goal is to provide distributed access to data in globally accessible, standard formats.