Description: Global Science & Technology, Inc. (GST) proposes to investigate information processing and delivery technologies to provide near-real-time Web-based access to satellite data from the National Polar-Orbiting Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS) Preparatory Project (NPP). We will investigate computing hardware and software requirements for serving data products acquired through NPP Direct Broadcast to modelers, forecasters, and decision-makers, via industry-standard Web services, within minutes of sensor acquisition. This effort will fill in a notable gap in the transition between current observational systems and the future NPOESS (National Polar-Orbiting Environmental Satellite System.

Benefits: Non-NASA customers for such systems include NOAA and the Department of Defense. Additionaly, GST, through its DirectMet(TM) commercial offering has a network of GOES groundstations through out the islands of the Caribbean. These nations are ill able to afford large data systems for their weather forecasts etc. A service such as the one proposed here would not require investment in capital equipment and would therefore be more attractive to these nations.

Since we are assuming the existence of near-real time science data records from direct broadcast/direct readout facilities, the emphasis of the proposal is on web services segment and the data cache on which the Web services depend. Web services of the sort proposed here are increasingly going to play a role in future dissemination of geo-spatial data.