Data Stewardship Advances and Solutions at the NASA Physical Oceanography Distributed Active Archive Center

Situated at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the Physical Oceanographic Distributed Active Archive Center (PO.DAAC) is one of 12 data centers sponsored by NASA's Earth Science Data and Information System (ESDIS) project. The PO.DAAC is tasked with distribution and long-term data preservation of NASA Earth science missions specific to physical oceanography, many of which have interdisciplinary applications for weather forecasting/monitoring and climate studies. From a Data Stewardship perspective, the PO.DAAC can be viewed from three primary focus areas, Dataset Lifecycle, Operations and Development. These three elements combined with an established System Engineering approach collectively ensure that all mandated PO.DAAC Quality, Quantity, Continuity, and Latency (QQCL) requirements are met. The thrust of PO.DAAC Dataset Lifecycle work focuses on fostering data product interoperability while maintaining QQCL standards. One way to achieve this is to ensure that standard, widely accepted data formats and metadata models are adopted for Level 2, 3, and 4 datasets. PO.DAAC Operations manages automated systems to support near real-time ingestion and distribution for 26 openly available datasets via various protocols including File Transfer Protocol (FTP), OPeNDAP, and Really Simple Syndication (RSS). There are 161 additional datasets available in “delayed mode” having latency beyond 12 hours. PO.DAAC's Development team facilitates data discovery, search, visualization and extraction functionality through several web interfaces, web services, and the PO.DAAC portal itself. The Drupal-powered portal provides the basis for learning about the available data products via a faceted search capability, allowing users to “drill down” to a dataset of interest based upon key characteristics. The High-level Tool for Interative Data Extraction (HiTIDE) provides enhanced L2 swath search, image, and subset capabilities, while the Live Access Server (LAS) is an analogous interface for L3 and L4 datasets. In term of communications, user inquiries are still sent initially by email. The technology we employ for user communication is being revamped, with the goal to have a 100% web portal communication interface along with an optional user forum in the near future. The implementation of Digital Object Identifiers (DOI) is also underway, which we hope will greatly improve dataset citations and usage metrics. The PO.DAAC is actively engaged in technological development on many other fronts, including but not limited to: ontology-based semantic web searching, granule-level quality-flag filtering, and additional enhancements to search and discovery interfaces. To help propel the PO.DAAC into the cutting-edge of data science and stewardship technology, with the goal to conceptualize and develop useful technology for our user communities, the PO.DAAC is actively engaged in the data science community through working groups, science teams, and calls for technology-based proposals.