For over 50 years, NASA has been collecting airborne and field data applicable to many science disciplines, including meteorology, hydrology, oceanography, ecology, terrestrial studies, and more. Data collected from these field investigations (also called airborne or field campaigns) have traditionally been stored in various locations, often making the observations difficult to locate, access, and reuse. 

To improve the discoverability and accessibility of NASA’s campaign data, ADMG designed and built the Catalog of Archived Suborbital Earth Science Investigations (CASEI). CASEI is a detailed inventory of contextual metadata on the agency’s airborne and field activities.  

CASEI provides information about NASA campaigns, platforms, instruments, data products, and other contextual details needed for appropriate data reuse. CASEI was built on a carefully designed metadata model that is based upon formalized definitions developed to span the range of terminology used across the longevity and disciplinary variety of NASA’s non-satellite observation history.  Inventory curators use decision trees to ensure consistent, objective decisions are made in placing the metadata into the inventory. 

The CASEI website allows users to intuitively explore NASA’s suborbital data holdings, locate, and access airborne and field data for scientific research and other applications. The highly interlinked information makes it easy to explore across content. An API is also available to explore and use CASEI programmatically.

Why is CASEI Needed?

The dispersed nature of existing NASA airborne and field data requires one central location for data discovery with an interface designed to meet the needs of various types of airborne data users. CASEI was developed as a centralized location for data discovery. Users need to search for airborne and field data by multiple types of criteria, including location, time frame, flight track information, geography type, and instrumentation details.

What Does CASEI Do?

Users can access details of existing, past, and upcoming NASA airborne and field campaigns. Users can also search for the data from campaigns and instruments using multiple parameters such as date range, geographical region, science focus area, or platform. Once users have identified the airborne and field data they need, they are directed to data product landing pages where they can download and access data directly from the NASA data repository.  Core aspects of CASEI’s unique functionality are actively being infused into the broader Earthdata web presence to provide more seamless user support and more efficient infrastructure across ESDIS.