Terra is the flagship of NASA’s Earth Observing System. Launched in 1999, Terra’s five instruments continue to gather data that enable scientists to address fundamental questions that are central to the six NASA Earth Science Research Focus Areas. It is amongst the most popular NASA datasets, serving not only the scientific community, but also governmental, commercial, and educational communities.

The strength of the Terra mission has always been rooted in its five instruments and the ability to fuse the instrument data together for obtaining greater quality of information for Earth Science compared to individual instruments alone. As the data volume grows and the central Earth Science questions shift from process-oriented to climate-oriented questions, the need for data fusion and the ability for scientists to perform large-scale analytics with long records have never been greater. The challenge is particularly acute for Terra, given its growing volume of data (> 1 petabyte), the storage of different instrument data at different archive centers, the different file formats and projection systems employed for different instrument data, and the inadequate cyberinfrastructure for scientists to access and process whole-mission fusion data (including Level 1 data). Sharing newly derived Terra products with the rest of the world also poses challenges.

The ACCESS to Terra Data Fusion Products effort aims to resolve two long-standing problems:

1. How do we efficiently generate and deliver Terra data fusion products?
2. How do we facilitate the use of Terra data fusion products by the community in generating new products and knowledge through national computing facilities, and disseminate these new products and knowledge through national data sharing services?

The effort leverages national facilities and services that are managed by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), specifically the National Petascale Computing Facility, which houses the Blue Waters supercomputer, and the National Data Service (NDS). Key advantages of leveraging Blue Waters and the NDS for access, usage, and distribution of Terra data fusion products and science results are that the Terra data and processing are local, with access and sharing that are global. This represents a significant community-element addition to NASA’s system of systems infrastructure. ACCESS to Terra Data Fusion Products will initiate the development, access and delivery of Level 1B radiance Terra Fusion files for the broader community. Level 1B fusion provides the necessary stepping-stone for developing higher-level products, and provides the framework for other flavors of fusion. Enhancements to our existing open source codes in the CyberGIS Toolkit for scalable map projections on any grid for the new Terra Fusion files will also be delivered.