Data Analysis Services

Data Analysis will fall into three primary categories: Custom Data Products, Standard Data Products, and Advanced Data Analysis Services.

Custom Data Products form the heart of the portal concept. The Data Acquisition Request (DAR) tool will be the true "workhorse" of the system. Here, users will be able to develop customized data products tailored to their individual needs. The DAR will be a forms-based application with users progressively selecting parameters for their order. This multi-page data selection tool will include, for example, drop-down boxes (or radial buttons) denoting:

  • Order Type: one-time data request, conditional alert request, or standing-order request
  • Data Category: e.g., snow cover, cloud cover, NDVI, precipitation, etc.
  • Area of Interest: Pre-defined boundaries (such as counties), specification of an XY bounding box, or upload of a custom vector shapefile
  • Spatial Resolution
  • Temporal Resolution or Aggregation
  • Output Formats: e.g., model-ready files, ASCII text files, GIS images, JPEGS, Comparison Plots/Graphs/Tables, PDF Report, etc.
  • Comparison statistics

Once a user builds and then confirms the query, the user will be directed to a Summary Output page which will detail the particulars of the order and what, if any, data is ready for immediate download. It most cases, the users will be informed that the customRS will send an automatically generated e-mail with instructions when new data is ready to be downloaded.

Depending on the query parameters entered by the user, the customRS will return one or more results:

  • Real-time results: ready for download
  • Monitoring results: for example, where a user sets up a query to have daily precipitation images and text files (formatted to their specifications) available for download from FTP
  • Conditional Alert results: for example, where a user sets up a query to have results returned only when certain criteria are met
  • Delayed results: for situations in which more complex processing is required ("free-form" query). These results would be ready for download as soon as a notification e-mail has been sent to the user (typically 24-hour turnaround).
  • Management results: A Report-form PDF document with images, tables, graphs, and text outlining the current and forecasted scenarios based on the user-specified query.

Types of data that the user may request to return in any of these results may include:

  • Files in model-input ready format (e.g., an HSPF .wdm file)
  • GIS Raster or Vectors in a user-specified file format (e.g., HDF, GeoTIFF, ESRI .shp)
  • ASCII text files with user-specified columns (e.g., X-cord, Y-cord, value)
  • Comparison graphics such as plots, graphics or tables
  • Image files such as .JPG, .PNG, .TIF
  • PDF report format with embedded text and graphics

Further, the user, in certain circumstances, may request various processing levels to be applied to the data from providing the data in a relatively “raw” data product (or band) format to processing the data product to specific customers specifications to analyzing the data and providing the results in customized format.

Standard Data Products will contain the most commonly requested data products available on customRS. These data will reside on GDA web servers, ready for immediate download. Users will not need to submit a request for the acquisition and re-processing of these datasets. Rather, they will be ready for download in commonly requested data formats, spatial/temporal resolutions, etc. An example standard data product may be daily average cloud cover by hydrologic unit code (HUC) boundaries.

The data available on the standard data products page will primarily be driven by the type and frequency of DARs received in the Custom Data Products section of the portal. For those products that are requested in a common format by a wide range of clients, the results will be automatically processed by GDA each morning/evening (or, as needed) and posted to the portal for download.

In the future, as the portal is up and running and regularly serving both standard and customized data products, GDA will also investigate the provision of more advanced data products or information based on the modeling of the NASA RS data. Examples here include: time series and suitability mapping.