276
K.S. Casey et al.
Pathfinder group with the data transcription, little progress was made over the
next 13 months. To determine the nature of the problem, in November 1990 Peter
Cornillon and Otis Brown met with John Knauss, who was the NOAA Administrator
at that time. In that meeting it became clear that the delays resulted form a misunderstanding within NOAA of a comment made by Knauss. When shown what
NASA was doing with satellite data, Knauss made a statement to the effect, “Why
can’t NOAA do these things?” This statement was misinterpreted by NOAA staff to
mean that the data were not to be provided to others and that NOAA was to undertake the processing steps. Knauss had not intended his statement to be interpreted
this way and clarified the situation with his staff after the meeting with Cornillon
and Brown. The data transcription began in earnest and progress continued steadily
on the Pathfinder Program from that point forward.
The Pathfinder OSWG first met in February of 1991 at Goddard Space Flight
Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, USA. Peter Cornillon of the University of Rhode
Island chaired the OSWG, which included members from NOAA, NASA, and
universities (see Appendix). The OSWG met approximately annually over the
next 4 years continually evolving and improving the algorithms and reprocessing
techniques. During this same period, the chairmen of the Pathfinder groups met
approximately annually to coordinate the work of the different Pathfinder projects
and subgroups met when needed to deal with data transcription and calibration
issues. To give a sense of the technical challenges faced by the OSWG to simply
manipulate the large volumes of data, Fig. 16.1 shows the first part of an e-mail sent
to Cornillon on 22 February 1991 containing a draft report from the first OSWG
meeting. Note the sender’s concern that the text might be garbled because he had
sent it at 9600 baud, which was considered to be very fast at the time. Much of the
information emerging from the various groups was distributed by fax or over the
Internet at extremely slow data rates by today’s standards.
Sea surface temperature retrieval algorithms proposed by the OSWG were tested
and implemented under the direction of Robert Evans at the University of Miami
where the data were processed from Level 0 (L0)/Level 1b (L1b) through to Level
3 (L3) equal-area datasets on an integerized sinusoidal grid. These data were
then sent to the NASA/Caltech JPL Physical Oceanography Distributed Active
Archive Center (PO.DAAC) where they were converted to equal-angle, regularly
gridded datasets in HDF4-Raster format and provided to users. The first four versions of Pathfinder SST were created at a reduced resolution of 9.28 km, due to
computational resource limitations of the 1990s.
NASA funding for the initial effort ended in 2001–2002 and in 2002 NODC
reinvigorated the Pathfinder SST activities with the goal of producing a Version 5
dataset at the full GAC resolution. Modest levels of NOAA funding from various
sources including NODC base resources and the NOAA Coral Reef Conservation
Program kept the Pathfinder SST Program alive from 2002 to 2006. During this
period, the Version 5 data were produced at the University of Miami and then sent
to NODC for final quality assurance, archiving, and provision to users. NODC
provided the Version 5 data to the PO.DAAC as well, to maintain continuity for
K.S. Casey et al.
Pathfinder group with the data transcription, little progress was made over the
next 13 months. To determine the nature of the problem, in November 1990 Peter
Cornillon and Otis Brown met with John Knauss, who was the NOAA Administrator
at that time. In that meeting it became clear that the delays resulted form a misunderstanding within NOAA of a comment made by Knauss. When shown what
NASA was doing with satellite data, Knauss made a statement to the effect, “Why
can’t NOAA do these things?” This statement was misinterpreted by NOAA staff to
mean that the data were not to be provided to others and that NOAA was to undertake the processing steps. Knauss had not intended his statement to be interpreted
this way and clarified the situation with his staff after the meeting with Cornillon
and Brown. The data transcription began in earnest and progress continued steadily
on the Pathfinder Program from that point forward.
The Pathfinder OSWG first met in February of 1991 at Goddard Space Flight
Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, USA. Peter Cornillon of the University of Rhode
Island chaired the OSWG, which included members from NOAA, NASA, and
universities (see Appendix). The OSWG met approximately annually over the
next 4 years continually evolving and improving the algorithms and reprocessing
techniques. During this same period, the chairmen of the Pathfinder groups met
approximately annually to coordinate the work of the different Pathfinder projects
and subgroups met when needed to deal with data transcription and calibration
issues. To give a sense of the technical challenges faced by the OSWG to simply
manipulate the large volumes of data, Fig. 16.1 shows the first part of an e-mail sent
to Cornillon on 22 February 1991 containing a draft report from the first OSWG
meeting. Note the sender’s concern that the text might be garbled because he had
sent it at 9600 baud, which was considered to be very fast at the time. Much of the
information emerging from the various groups was distributed by fax or over the
Internet at extremely slow data rates by today’s standards.
Sea surface temperature retrieval algorithms proposed by the OSWG were tested
and implemented under the direction of Robert Evans at the University of Miami
where the data were processed from Level 0 (L0)/Level 1b (L1b) through to Level
3 (L3) equal-area datasets on an integerized sinusoidal grid. These data were
then sent to the NASA/Caltech JPL Physical Oceanography Distributed Active
Archive Center (PO.DAAC) where they were converted to equal-angle, regularly
gridded datasets in HDF4-Raster format and provided to users. The first four versions of Pathfinder SST were created at a reduced resolution of 9.28 km, due to
computational resource limitations of the 1990s.
NASA funding for the initial effort ended in 2001–2002 and in 2002 NODC
reinvigorated the Pathfinder SST activities with the goal of producing a Version 5
dataset at the full GAC resolution. Modest levels of NOAA funding from various
sources including NODC base resources and the NOAA Coral Reef Conservation
Program kept the Pathfinder SST Program alive from 2002 to 2006. During this
period, the Version 5 data were produced at the University of Miami and then sent
to NODC for final quality assurance, archiving, and provision to users. NODC
provided the Version 5 data to the PO.DAAC as well, to maintain continuity for