GENESIS: The General Earth Science Investigation Suite

GENESIS is a NASA-sponsored partnership between the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, academia, and three NASA data centers to develop a new suite of web services tools to facilitate multi-sensor investigations in Earth System Science. Residing within a framework known as SciFlo, these tools will offer versatile operators for data access, subsetting, registration, fusion, compression, and advanced statistical analysis. They will first be deployed in a model server at JPL, and later released as an open-source toolkit to encourage enhancement by independent developers. While the initial work will focus on four premier atmospheric sensors – AIRS, MODIS, MISR, and GPS – the modular design offers ready extension and reuse on many Earth science data sets. The SciFlo design grew out of the pressing needs of scientists active in studies with these new sensors. The tools themselves will be co-developed by atmospheric scientists and information technologists from several institutions. At each step the tools will be tested under fire within active investigations, including cross-comparison of spaceborne climate sensors; cloud spectral analysis; upper tropospherestratosphere water transport; and global climate model testing. The tools will then be evaluated by our partner data centers and later infused into their operations.