IPO/JPSS Support (formerly NPOESS)

The aim of this project is to develop and adapt HDF5 technologies and provide HDF5 support for the Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS) and Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (NPP). JPSS is part of the restructured National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS). This project is funded through NOAA's National Environmental Satellite, Data & Information Service (NESDIS).

JPSS is a new generation of low earth orbiting satellites that monitor environmental conditions and provide data for long-range weather and climate forecasts. The NPOESS project was established by a 1994 Presidential Decision Directive to converge the polar-orbiting satellite systems operated by the Department of Commerce and by the Department of Defense into a single, cost-efficient integrated system. The new system would also take advantage of the advanced remote sensing and spacecraft technologies provided by NASA through its Earth Observing System.

The JPSS will circle the Earth approximately once every 100 minutes, delivering up to eight terabytes of data concerning the Earth's weather, atmosphere, oceans, land, and near-space environment. The data will be processed on the ground and distributed within 30 minutes of observation to its central users, and to the world within 24 hours.

The volume and complexity of the JPSS data, and the enormously high speed at which it must be processed, requires powerful technology and expertise in using this technology. JPSS data will be archived and distributed in HDF5.

The HDF Group provides support for JPSS/NPP data producers and users, as it has done for more than 15 years for the NASA ESDIS program and its estimated 1.6 million users of petabytes of earth science data.

The HDF Group JPSS project currently focuses on the following areas:

• Improving accessibility and usability of JPSS/NPP data

  JPSS data will be distributed in HDF5 files containing raw data and indexing metadata that allows fast access to the raw data. The HDF Group is developing software libraries and tools to provide easy and intuitive access to this data.

  As part of this effort, The HDF Group has created a library of C and Fortran routines to access and manipulate data referenced by object and region references and to access and manipulate data packed into integer values. We continue to seek feedback from JPSS/NPP applications developers and users, as well as from the wider HDF5 community, and will improve this library as requested.

• Developing tools to facilitate access and management of JPSS/NPP data

  The HDF Group has enhanced the h5dump utility to display data pointed to by region references and to display data packed into an integer array. These new features became available in the HDF5 1.8.4 release.

  HDFView has been enhanced to display data referenced by object and region references; this feature became available in the HDF Java Products release 2.6 and later . A feature to display data packed into an integer array (e.g., NPP qaulity flags) became available in the HDF Java release 2.7 FTP download .

  Currently we are actively working on the h5edit and h5augjpss tools, which will make it possible to change HDF5 files to make them more accessible and meaningful for certain applications, most notably netCDF-based applications. We are seeking feedback regarding these tools from JPSS applications developers and JPSS data users.

  We are also developing a nagg tool for aggregating and packaging NPP granules. The tool allows rearranging NPP product data granules from existing files, e.g., downloaded from IDPS, into new files with aggregations or packaging that are better suited as input for a particular application.

• Maintaining HDF5 software on systems used by JPSS/NPP

  The HDF Group is maintaining HDF5 software on the following systems used by JPSS

  • Linux 32 and 64-bit
  • AIX 5.3 and 6.1
  • Windows 32 and 64-bit
  • Mac Intel OS X 10.5 and later

• Providing rapid and quality user support

  Please contact with questions about the HDF5 Library and tools, and software developed for the project. To assure fast response, include “JPSS” in the subject line and a short description of the project you are working on in the body of your email.

Click to hear Richard Ullman of NASA / GSFC speak on the HDF5 NPP Data Format