Developing a Global Agriculture Information System

Monitoring global agricultural crop conditions during the growing season and estimating potential seasonal production are critically important for market development of U.S. agricultural products and for global food security. Two major operational users of satellite remote sensing for global crop monitoring are the USDA Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS) and the U.N. World Food Program (WFP). The primary goal of FAS is to improve foreign market access for U.S. agricultural products. The WFP uses food to meet emergency needs and to support economic and social development. Both use global agricultural decision support systems that can integrate and synthesize a variety of data sources to provide accurate and timely information on global crop conditions.

The Agricultural Information System (AIS), currently under development, is based on the existing TRMM Online Visualization and Analysis System (TOVAS). The AIS will provide environmental data and information to support agricultural activities; specifically, it will operationally provide access to NASA Earth Science Enterprise (ESE) and other data products (e.g., rainfall, crop model outputs) and services.

The AIS will enable the remote, interoperable access to distributed data, by taking advantage of the GrADS-DODS Server (GDS), a stable, secure data server that provides subsetting and analysis services across the Internet, for any GrADS-readable data set. The subsetting capability allows users to retrieve a specified spatial region from a large data set, eliminating the need to first download everything. The analysis capability allows users to retrieve the results of an operation applied to one or more data sets on the server.

The first release of AIS will contain: 1) Analysis of current conditions that contains links to complete product (rainfall, surface reflectance, etc.) analysis maps for selected regions worldwide and the conterminous United States; 2) Online Visualization and Analysis System that allows to access global, current and historical data and analysis and generate customized maps, time series, and digital data.