The Distributed Oceanographic Match-up Service (DOMS) is a web-accessible service tool that will reconcile satellite and in situ datasets in support of NASA’s Earth Science mission. The service prototype was built and tested in 2017 and provides a mechanism for users to input a series of geospatial references for satellite observations (e.g., footprint location, date, and time) and receive the in-situ observations that are “matched” to the satellite data within a selectable temporal and spatial domain. The DOMS prototype includes several characteristic in-situ and satellite observation datasets. For the in-situ data, surface marine observations are included from the International Comprehensive Ocean-Atmosphere Data Set (ICOADS), the Shipboard Automated Meteorological and Oceanographic System Initiative (SAMOS), and the first and second Salinity Processes in the Upper Ocean Regional Studies (SPURS1 and 2). Satellite products include JPL ASCATB L2 Coastal winds, SMAP L2B swath salinity dataset, AVHRR OI GHRSST, and the high-resolution gridded MUR-SST product. Importantly, although DOMS has been established with these selected datasets, the open-source code will be readily extendable to other in situ and satellite collections, which could support additional science disciplines.
Technical challenges addressed during the development include (1) ensuring that the match-up algorithms perform with sufficient speed to return desired information to the user, (2) performing data matches using datasets that are distributed on the network, and (3) returning actual observations for the matches [e.g., salinity] with sufficient metadata so the value difference can be properly interpreted. The DOMS team leveraged existing technologies (i.e., the Extensible Data Gateway Environment, OPeNDAP, SQL and graph/triple-store databases) and cloud computing during the development process. DOMS was designed with web graphical user interface interface for users to browse and to submit match-up requests interactively. DOMS also provides an underlying web service interface for machine-to-machine matchup operations to enable external applications and services.
Original concept design for DOMS.
Through the prototype process, details of this design will change,
but the fundamental distributed nature of DOMS will be maintained
