GIS Efforts in Satellite Services Division

Ralph E. Meiggs
Satellite Services Division, NESDIS

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is working toward an enterprise-wide effort to develop a geospatial foundation model for data sharing, which aligns with a government wide effort for the concept of a Geospatial One-Stop web portal. The goal of this portal is to offer spatially enabled data in more widely used universal formats with accompanying Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) compliant metadata through a web portal, making the data mining and retrieval more intuitive and user friendly.

The Satellite Services Division (SSD) of the Office of Satellite Data Processing and Distribution (OSDPD) has joined this effort with existing conversion techniques to develop satellite image products and derived products in standard GIS compatible formats. SSD is in the process of
developing methods to provide accompanying FGDC compliant metadata. For years, users from diverse areas of research, including the Federal Government and academic institutions have requested conversion of data from the complicated formats most image data and products are
currently in to a format which is more widely used and easy to integrate with existing data from other sources. Offering data in more universal formats will not only open data to a more diverse user group, but will also prepare OSDPD for integrating our data to the National Geospatial Data Clearinghouse and NOAA Geospatial One-Stop or any other web interface data sharing portal.