Towards Data and Sensor Planning Service for Coupling Earth Science Models and Earth Observations

How to obtain sensor observation data easily and quickly is one of the challenging research areas in the Earth science community. Data and Sensor Planning Service aims to generate requirements on Earth observations data from which the geophysical products needed by Earth science models can derive. Then, the service discovers relevant data sources which meet these requirements, schedules data acquisition by ordering and retrieving data from these sources, and processes and returns the customized data which will be used in the Earth science models. In this general framework, Sensor Web Enablement specifications of Open Geospatial Consortium are implemented and integrated with other open Web geospatial data services seamlessly to access real or virtual Earth observation sensors. Additionally, an Ajax-enabled browser client is built to facilitate the standard sensor Web operations, user account management along with data acquisition. The prototype system is demonstrated to retrieve near real-time satellite observation data from Comprehensive Large Array-data Stewardship System through standard Web services, and also is applied in the bird migration model which uses climate data, vegetation data, as well as other remotely sensed and in-situ observation data to determine the bird migration routes and identify the possible resting areas.

I. Introduction

With the rapid development of Earth observation sensor web, accessing the large amount of dynamic sensor observations for specific times and locations has become a challenging task [1], [2]. The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) has defined a set of web services standards that enable users to discover, access, and use data from different types of sensors. Through these standard and interoperable Web interfaces, sensors can be interconnected with each other. On the other side, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has carried out a large number of activities on both Earth Science Models (ESM) and Earth Observations (EO), but there has been little coupling between the fields. The NASA-funded project, named the Self-adaptive Earth Predictive System (SEPS), aims at building a general framework using open geospatial standards to couple ESM and EO [3]. SEPS has been achieved through an asynchronous, message-based, event-driven, dynamic geospatial sensor web based on OGC Web services.