The Italian Remote Sensing Data Archive: from DBRMS to Web Distribution

Abstract

During the Antarctic campaign 1989-1990, a NOAA-HRPT receiving station was installed at the Italian Base, Mario Zucchelli Station, at Terra Nova Bay. The receiving station is operational when the base is open, usually from mid-October to mid-February. Three NOAA polar orbiting satellites are normally in operation at the same time, at the present they are NOAA-15, NOAA-17, NOAA-18. During the campaign 1998-1990 was installed a new dual-receiving HRPT station to get also DMSP (Defence Meteorological Satellites Program of USA) satellites and currently we receive three DMSP satellites f-13, f-14 and f-15. At the present about fifty passes per day are acquired and processed each day reaching a total of around 4500 passes per expedition. All data acquired during campaigns are stored on DDS tape, which format is changed during years. Up to now more than 7 TB of data are stored on different media (from 8mm tapes to DDS4 tapes), regarding a period of time from V to XXII expedition. In order to achieve a more flexible and reliable system to access all the above data, in 2005, a process to copy to Hard-Disk storage in RAID mode, has been started. The activity is a work in progress, in the meantime the opportunity to realize a web application to process and distribute data to scientific community has been planned. We created a working prototype system based on a LAMP open source architecture (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) and the TERASCAN software (from SeaSpace Corp.) to process and archive remote sensing data. The demo provides a web form to query the relational database containing all data related to each raw acquired satellite pass and as final result a quicklook of the requested pass is showed. This demo is just a first step of an application that in the future will be able to supply to the user a valid tool to navigate in entire data archive and eventually getting products such AVHRR images, TOVS profile, ARGOS data or extracting the complete satellite pass.