Global-Scale Remote Sensing

Facilitating Access to Global Earth System Satellite Data from Terra Fusion

Terra, the flagship of NASA’s Earth Observing System (EOS), was launched into orbit on December 18, 1999 and carries five instruments critical to investigating how and why the global Earth system changes. Research and applications of this dataset have crucial potential to improve the broader understanding of global changes, to predict future change trends and to estimate their societal impact.

The Terra Fusion project at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (UIUC) integrates orbital Terra satellite data from the five instruments to facilitate manipulation and new analysis. Serving an collection of data subsets of common interest for climate research (Greenland, China, India, Japan, Nigeria, Antarctica and Bermuda), the OSN supports access to more than 160 TB of integrated remote sensing data.

Instructions for public access to the dataset can be found here. Detailed information about Terra Fusion can be accessed here.

Visualization of land coverage captured by an orbit of the multi-instrument Terra satellite, using data from the Terra Fusion project (PI: Dr. Larry Di Girolamo). Image created by the Advanced Visualization Lab at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.