ECHO – enabling interoperability with NASA earth science data and services

The NASA-developed Earth Observing System (EOS) Clearinghouse (ECHO) is a spatial and temporal metadata registry that enables the science community to more easily use and exchange NASA's data and services. Currently, ECHO contains metadata for over 2,149 data collections comprising 56 million individual data granules and 14 million browse images. ECHO stores metadata from a variety of science disciplines and domains, including Climate Variability and Change, Carbon Cycle and Ecosystems, Earth Surface and Interior, Atmospheric Composition, Weather, and Water and Energy Cycle. ECHO also has a services registry for community-developed search services and data services. NASA's Earth science data has already proven itself to be extremely useful in understanding the planet Earth as an integrated system. For example, NASA's EOS data are helping scientists gain a better understanding of the processes that affect the composition of the ozone and the effects of the composition on climate change. NASA's EOS data is also helping scientists move forward in their efforts to predict natural occurrences, such as wildfires. The data used in these studies are archived in distributed locations around the country and archived using different metadata models for each of the different science discipline communities. To help science communities that need data from multiple organizations and multiple disciplines, ECHO provides a uniform view of NASA's data. It allows users to more efficiently search and access data and services and increases the potential for interoperability with new tools and services. The value of these resources increases as the potential to exchange and interoperate increases.