AMFIC-WSDB: A web database for hosting and easy retrieval of atmospheric data from satellites
Highlights
► We analyzed atmospheric composition satellite data from SCIAMACHY aboard ENVISAT. ► Aerosol and cloud related data from MODIS TERRA and AQUA were also analyzed. ► The data are or could be hosted by the AMFIC Web Satellite Data Base (AMFIC-WSDB). ► We present the main features and advantages of the AMFIC-WSDB. ► A 5 min project on methane highlights the easiness of using the AMFIC-WSDB.
Section snippets
HDF and netCDF files
The increasing demand for satellite and ground-based atmospheric composition data has led to a significant number of simple web databases of which satellite datasets are available. Most of them offer data in binary formats (HDF, HDF-EOS, netCDF, etc.) which makes their use possible only by a specialized group of the scientific community. The availability of data is in this form because the amount of information is enormous and a way must be found so that the files have an acceptable size. With
Acquiring data from the AMFIC-WSDB
As mentioned above the AMFIC-WSDB was developed taking into account the need for easier acquisition and analysis of satellite data from users around the world with different levels of expertise. Scientists not specializing in satellite remote sensing or scientists interested in data around a specific spot (e.g. for validation purposes, campaigns, etc.) have direct access to ascii columnar files through a set of interactive maps, instead of getting into the time consuming and complex procedure
Some technical details
This paper mostly focuses on the analysis of the datasets that are hosted by the database and the interactive way the data can be acquired from the user interface. A detailed technical description of how the AMFIC-WSDB was built is not within the main scopes of this is paper. However, in the following lines we give some technical details. First of all, AMFIC-WSDB is a MySQL database while the site has been developed using php and runs on an Apache server under Linux. We have indexed a simple
AMFIC-WSDB through a short scientific project
Here, a 5 min scientific project, showing the potential use of the AMFIC web database in educational as well as scientific purposes, is presented. The project is based on a paper by Xiong et al. (2009). Using satellite observations from the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) satellite instrument aboard AQUA (Aumann et al., 2003) and Tracer Model 3 (TM3; Houweling et al., 2006) model results for 2003–2007, they showed that the tropospheric CH4 enhancement in summer and its rapid disappearance in
Summary and Conclusions
In this paper the analysis methodology applied on the data that emerged from the various AMFIC work packages was described. The original data were brought to an ascii columnar timeseries format so that they can easily be acquired through the AMFIC EU project web satellite database (AMFIC-WSDB) in an interactive way and further be analyzed from the users. The same data analysis method was also applied on other datasets showing that aerosol and cloud related satellite data from MODIS TERRA and
Acknowledgments
This work was funded partly under the AMFIC Project of the European Commission (Aeronautics and Space STREP, Contract no. 030940). The authors would like to thank their AMFIC partners for providing the data included in the AMFIC-WSDB. Many thanks are also expressed to NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) Level 1 and Atmosphere Archive and Distribution System (LAADS) for making available the MODIS data, NASA's GES DISC for making available the AIRS methane data and NOAA ESRL and WMO's WDCGG
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