NASA Global Satellite Observations for Smart Cities

Over the past several decades, the number of megacities (exceeding 10 million people in population) has been rapidly growing around the world, for example, in Asia alone, more than 30 cities are listed as megacities including Tokyo, Shanghai, etc., demanding effective management for city planning, operations, disaster mitigation, etc. The smart city approach requires information to be collected from multiple sources and to be integrated with modern technologies, providing a new and cost-effective way to manage cities around the world.

Environmental information at different spatial and temporal scales (e.g. ranging from near real time to climate), is one of critical information sources for city management and disaster mitigation. Each year, severe weather events can strike a city and cause damage to city’s infrastructure as well as interrupt people’s daily life. Effective management of water, air pollution, energy, etc. also requires such information to be available. Nonetheless, making this information available for timely and easy access is important for city’s planning and management activities.

Located in Greenbelt, Maryland, USA, the NASA Goddard Earth Sciences (GES) Data and Information Services Center (DISC) is one of twelve NASA Science Mission Directorate (SMD) Data Centers that provide Earth science data, information, and services to research scientists, applications scientists, applications users, and students around the world. The GES DISC (https://disc.gsfc.nasa.gov) is the home (archive) of NASA Precipitation and Hydrology, as well as Atmospheric Composition and Dynamics remote sensing data and information.

In this presentation, we will introduce global and regional satellite observations with emphasis on the hydrologic cycle (precipitation, wind, temperature, soil moisture, etc.) for smart cities. These products, consisting of both near-real-time and historical datasets, are publicly available and can be used for global and regional research and applications. Accessing and analyzing remote sensing data can be a daunting task for novices. To alleviate this situation, the GES DISC has developed a wide range of data services such as online evaluation and exploration of datasets, data subsetting, format conversion, online data visualization and analysis (https://giovanni.gsfc.nasa.gov), OPeNDAP, data rods services for time series, GIS, etc. Examples of using these datasets in smart cities and future plans will be included.