The ultimate goal of NASA's Terra mission is to unravel the mysteries of climate and environmental change. The instruments on board the Terra spacecraft are collecting global data sets needed to study the inter-relationships inherent in the Earth's coupled atmosphere-land-ocean system. Issues such as the Earth's energy balance, global cloudiness, the effects of atmospheric aerosols, changes in the land surface and the hydrological impact of these can be addressed with simultaneous data from instruments such as the Clouds and the Earth's Radiant Energy System (CERES) and the Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer (MISR).

An important feature of the experiments onboard Terra is the ability to obtain data from multiple experiments viewing the same phenomena. CERES and MISR data available from the Atmospheric Sciences Data Center (ASDC) at NASA's Langley Research Center are used to demonstrate various complementary views of the Earth system. Examples are given of spatially and temporally coincident data covering phenomena such as large-scale weather systems, aerosol concentrations from dust or fires and variations in surface features in regions of hydrological interest.

CERES uses broadband radiometric measurements in three channels to provide both solar-reflected and Earth-emitted radiation throughout the atmosphere and, in combination with simultaneous measurements from instruments such as the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MODIS), provide new information on cloud properties. MISR obtains precisely calibrated images taken simultaneously at nine different angles and four wavelengths (blue, green, red and near-infrared) to provide data related to aerosols, clouds, and the Earth's surface. Information about all of the available CERES and MISR data products, as well as related products, and how to obtain them can be found at the ASDC web site, http://eosweb.larc.nasa.gov.