The NASA Langley Atmospheric Sciences Data Center (ASDC), located in Hampton, VA was established to support the Earth Observing System (EOS) as part of NASA's Earth Science Enterprise (ESE) and the U.S. Global Change Research Program. It is one of nine Distributed Active Archive Centers sponsored by NASA as part of the Earth Observing System Data and Information System. ESE strives to understand and protect our home planet by using NASA's view from space to study the Earth system and improve prediction of Earth system change, giving the world new and powerful means to observe the Earth as a system.

At present, ASDC supports more than 800 data sets from over 35 projects and the data volume will surpass one petabyte (the equivalent of 2 million CDs) by the end of 2004. The data volume is a combination of satellite observations, processed data, and aircraft and surface measurements. The majority of the data files contain moderately complex data structures in binary format.

ASDC distributed over 58 terabytes of data to more than 8100 customers in 2003. Customers include scientists; researchers; universities; federal, state, and local governments; application users; members of the commercial remote sensing community; K-12 educators; and the general public. Detailed information about the ASDC data products, documentation, data ordering interface, and tools for working with the data, is available from the ASDC Web site at http://eosweb.larc.nasa.gov