The following information on terms of agreement between US and Brazil under which LBA-DIS has to work was presented at the SSC meeting:

1. LBA-DIS has to be developed by Brazil.
   In practical terms NASA will continue the development of software tools for LBA Ecology, and will offer to share these tools LBA wide (support from Brazil and Europe in the development is welcome). Brazil must be able to purchase all software tools used in LBA. Eventually all tools used in LBA have to be at CPTEC.

 

2. All data has to remain within Brazil.
   In practical terms: of whatever data are collected the original will remain in Brazil, e.g. with the Brazilian co-PI. Only a copy will go to the US or Europe.

 

3. All LBA data has to be submitted to LBA DIS within one year.
   LBA data are all data acquired in or over the LBA region, meant to contribute to LBA science. Exceptions of the one year rule are for proprietary or commercial data.

The first set of pre-LBA CD-ROMs is ready for print. The printing costs will be shared between Brazil, US and Europe.

The additional list of existing / pre-LBA II datasets compiled by Holger will be included in the 1^st CD-ROM.

This tool developed at ORNL for LBA Ecology is currently tested with datasets from US, Brazil and Europe. It is expected to be available early 99 to harvest metadata from distributed servers of all LBA components, e.g. individual PI servers.

It is not clear yet if harvesting of sites holding LBA data is to be done centrally at ORNL, or if separate harvesting and building of metadata-indices is needed for each LBA module.

LBA Ecology data integration into the LBA wide metadatabase will be handled through the Ecology project office

Action: Holger: start on including European data for indexing

Additional tools

These additonal tools will be suggested to LBA in support of LBA science:

• Data registry tool – this will be developed at ORNL for LBA Ecology for quick entry of the minimum relevant information about data sets (who, what, when, where) for announcing data that are becoming available.
• Metadata entry tool – will be developed at ORNL for LBA Ecology to facilitate metadata entry for the web crawler – this is to be done after data registry and depending on availability metadata can be provided by the PI in several submissions
• Documentation tool – development still to be decided, could be a web based tool to provide prefabricated data documentation or picklists for documentation that will accompany the data when it goes to the archive
• QA tool – can support scientists in their own data quality assessment, possibly also offering some reformatting options. For this tool requirements still have to be defined.

Action: Marc and Gilberto discuss options and prepare a proposal on QA tool

The WG discussed the question "What is data integration?"

For the moment the working group saw the main integration through standard units and formats. These could be specified by the WG for LBA scientists before data collection.

Action: Jeff provide a short set of minimum requirements for standardization

Another option for data integration and value added data products could be software tools for accessing, viewing, mapping, and analyzing data in a standardized way, e.g. using the GIS options included in the Spring software at INPE.

Using such a tool would require some minimum standards for metadata-formats just as the web crawler is also based on some standards formats. Formats cannot be imposed upon the research community, but the WG will explain, e.g. at the next SSC meeting the options, implications and benefits of format standardization for achieving LBA wide data integration.

Action: Gilberto provide some information on these options to the working group

Marc check on how to integrate with the ESRI work of Dave Skole

This issue should also be addressed through the WG at the upcoming workshop on LBA remote sensing and land surface data needs organized by Thelma Krug and others, possibly in March 99.

The WG discussed the situation of proprietary data for use in LBA, such as:

• hydrology data from ANEEL / DNAEE, which have only few gauges available online
• meteorological data that are of general interest to LBA
• remote sensing images

LBA wide agreements are needed with data providers.

The WG will recommend to sign such agreements with the respective organizations.

The WG also recommends to have a full time person employed at CPTEC for data management support. This support person would also have to link to other organizations for data agreements and would be supported by the LBA office at CPTEC. This recommendation will be made to the OIC when it is established.

The web policies for LBA web sites as presented to the SSC were accepted with slight modifications. These modifications were included. The policies will be included on the new LBA web site.

The new web site structure as developed in May 98 will be refined and populated with information from the current homepage in Europe (Staring Center) through Holger Hoff, Ronald Hutjes, and Maarten Waterloo. After that it will be returned to CPTEC were it will then be maintained.

WG Charter

The WG charter was accepted without comments and will be put on the new LBA web site.

It will be presented to the OIC when it is established.

WG membership:

The working group now has the following members:

US: Jeff Newcomer (co-chair), John Melack (SSC), Marc Nadler, Merilyn Gentry

Europe: Holger Hoff (co-chair), John Gash (SSC), Ronald Hutjes, Tim Richards

Replacement issues are listed in the charter. The WG chairperson will be a Brazilian citizen and will be selected by the South American WG members.

It is intended to add to the WG a TRMM representative for the US and a EUSTACH / CLAIRE representative for Europe.

Telecons

Future telecons will be more clearly structured. There will be an agenda with the items that require attention of all WG members to be dealt with during the first half hour of the telecon. Further discussions that may be needed after that, can be done in smaller groups. The hope is to have full telecon participation of the working group that way.

Also minutes will be distributed after every telecon and action items will be followed more clearly before the following telecon.