Thursday, August 19, 2010

NASA Earth Observation (NEO) Website is awesome

I recently came cross this NEO (NASA Earth Observation) website that contains a lot of recent and historical satellite image data related to environment and climate change. Unlike most other websites of the same type, NEO’s simple and pretty web GUI design and user experience really surprises me.

neo

Screenshot taken from NASA Earth Observation site at http://neo.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/Search.html

The dataset hosted by NEO are divided into categories like ocean, atmosphere , energy, land and life. For each of those categories users can browse, search, preview, download, and analysis which is pretty much all you may want to do with satellite data. What’s really awesome is that you can do all of those things in a single ajax-based web page (you see only one screenshot is enough).

Discover data

To find the data, you can select one of the main categories, and then either search or look through the full list. Once it’s found you will be able to see the brief description and preview it in an interactive web map (support zoom in/out)

Download option

Most of the data can be downloaded as PNG, JPEG, GeoTiff, CSV, KML/KMZ directly through NEO home page, and whenever applicable you can also download data in original format e.g. HDF on the same page of data search result.

Web Map Service

NEO also provides WMS access to its data, which is a super plus for those who don't want to download and host data themselves.  NEO’s WMS links:

http://neowms.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/wms/wms?version=1.1.1&service=WMS&request=GetCapabilities

http://neowms.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/wms/wms?version=1.3.0&service=WMS&request=GetCapabilities

image

Consume NEO WMS in QGIS

NASA Earth Observation site is just awesome!!!