A Proposed Earth Science Collaboratory for Remote Sensing Data Analysis

The past decade has seen many advancements in data management of remote sensing data, with much of the data available online. However, while the data access problem is largely (though not completely) solved, remote sensing data is still sometimes difficult to find, in part because of the myriad data sources. Data can also be difficult to use, especially for first-time users of a particular data set, due to complex data structures and data formats, as well as the need to understand how ancillary and quality information should be used in analysis. We propose the development of an Earth Science Collaboratory (ESC), which would be a rich science data analysis environment available to the community. The ESC would integrate tools and services with datasets and facilitate the sharing of the related knowledge.