A Review of EOSDIS QA Metadata: Support for EOS Quality Assessment (QA) and QA Metadata Update Tools

Quality Assessment (QA) is defined within NASA Earth Observing System (EOS) as the process that identifies and flags data products that obviously and significantly do not conform to the expected accuracies for the particular product type. Operationally, QA involves quality control measures that can be applied to the data products, before release to the general science community. This is a challenging task within EOS, due to the large volume and the complexity of data produced and the near real time mode between data production and distribution. The EOS Data and Information System (EOSDIS) provides the computing and network facilities, to support the generation and archival of data products from EOS satellites, and distribution of data productions to user community. To accommodate the high volume data production and simultaneously provide end users with some indication of scientific and operational quality of data, the ECS has incorporated a high degree of automation within its design. EOS QA methodology integrates: (I) the automated detection of certain types of suspect data during product generation, (ii) the capability of EOSDIS to alert the instrument team scientists and processing facility personnel to suspect data, (iii) the extraction of this data from the archives for QA purposes and the subsequent storage of QA results within EOSDIS, and (iv) the organization, archival and display of all of these QA results in a user-friendly format for the user community. This paper discusses the ECS metadata attributes designed to support QA functions, and tools and functionality that have been developed by ECS for the science teams and the DAACs to perform their manual QA analyses and enter their QA results into the QA Metadata.