NASA's Physical Oceanography Distributed Active Archive Center (PO.DAAC) is located at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. PO.DAAC manages and provides tools and services for NASA's oceanographic and hydrologic data (satellite, airborne, and in-situ) to enable greater understanding of the physical processes and condition of the global ocean. Measurements include gravity, ocean winds, sea surface temperature, ocean surface topography, sea surface salinity, and circulation. The data support a wide range of applications including climate research, weather prediction, resource management, policy, and the stewardship of ocean data resources.
Sample data holdings include Aquarius, Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP), Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE), GRACE Follow-on (GRACE-FO), NASA Scatterometer (NSCAT), Quick Scatterometer (QuikSCAT), Rapid Scatterometer (RapidScat), Cyclone Global Navigation Satellite System (CYGNSS), TOPEX/POSEIDON, Jason-1, Group for High Resolution Sea Surface Temperature (GHRSST), Oceans Melting Greenland (OMG), Salinity Processes in the Upper Ocean Regional Study (SPURS), and Making Earth System Data Records for Use in Research Environments (MEaSUREs).
Data access services include PO.DAAC Drive, Thematic Real-time Environmental Distributed Data Services (THREDDS), Open-source Project for a Network Data Access Protocol (OPeNDAP), PO.DAAC Web Services, and PO.DAAC GitHub repository.
Tools that provide subsetting, extraction, and visualization capabilities include High-level Tool for Interactive Data Extraction (HiTIDE), Live Access Server (LAS), and State of the Ocean (SOTO).
Global Ocean Data
The entire PO.DAAC data holdings are maintained online for instant download via standard FTP. PO.DAAC also hosts online search and access tools that give users the ability to identify and select the specific data that meets a particular need. In addition, the PO.DAAC web portal provides a forum for users to access information related to the data holdings and learn about the utility of the data for ocean and climate research.
Contact Information
Suresh Vannan, DAAC Manager
John Klose, Deputy DAAC Manager
Mike Gangl, DAAC System Engineer
Dr. Jinbo Wang, DAAC Scientist
Ed Armstrong, DAAC Data Engineer
Dr. Catalina Oaida, User Services Lead
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
4800 Oak Grove Drive
Pasadena, CA 91109