[ESIP-all] Announcement: LANCE AMSR2 Near Real-Time Snow Products Available

[Harrison, Sherry]

Dear Colleagues,

The NASA Land Atmosphere Near real-time Capability for EOS (LANCE)<https://earthdata.nasa.gov/data/near-real-time-data> AMSR2 Processing Center at the Global Hydrology Resource Center Distributed Active Archive Center (GHRC DAAC) in Huntsville, Alabama would like to announce the availability of the dataset NRT AMSR2 Daily L3 Global Snow Water Equivalent EASE-Grids<https://ghrc.nsstc.nasa.gov/hydro/details.pl?ds=A2_DySno_NRT>. This dataset contains snow water equivalent (SWE) data and quality assurance flags mapped to the Northern and Southern Hemisphere 25 km Equal-Area Scalable Earth Grids (EASE-Grids).  It is generated incrementally in near real-time, as data are acquired from the AMSR2 instrument on the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) GCOM-W1 satellite.  LANCE AMSR2 GIBS snow imagery will be available in Worldview<https://worldview.earthdata.nasa.gov/> very soon.

Note:  The AMSR2 snow product is generated using JAXA brightness temperature data from the descending satellite passes only.  These NRT data are processed as received from the satellite, meaning there may be extra or missing data at the beginning of a descending pass.  In these cases data will be missing from the resulting snow product and corresponding imagery as well.

The LANCE AMSR2 near real-time data and imagery, with noted limitations, are generated and available to registered users via HTTPS with an average latency of less than 3 hours.  While not a substitute for climate research quality products, near real-time products are in high demand in fields such as numerical weather prediction and forecasting, monitoring of natural hazards, disaster relief, agriculture and homeland security.  More information about LANCE AMSR2 near real-time data is available at http://lance.nsstc.nasa.gov/.

Note:  Please be aware that the LANCE AMSR2 NRT products are generated using modified versions of the AMSR-E standard product algorithms, which have not been updated to reflect the differences between AMSR-E and AMSR2 calibrations.  All LANCE AMSR2 data should be used with the understanding that these are preliminary data products. As updates are made to the JAXA AMSR2 Level-1R brightness temperature data set (the data used as input to our products), those changes will be reflected in the higher level products.

LANCE AMSR2 is also co-located with the AMSR Science Investigator-led Processing System (SIPS) at the GHRC DAAC. The AMSR SIPS is responsible for the generation of climate research quality products; these products will be available from the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) beginning in 2016.

LANCE AMSR2 would like to thank you for using our data.

As always, we welcome any comments or suggestions.

Sincerely,  Sherry

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Sherry Harrison
UAHuntsville
256-961-7973
sharrison at itsc.uah.edu

Global Hydrology Resource Center DAAC
https://ghrc.nsstc.nasa.gov/
support-ghrc at earthdata.nasa.gov

LANCE AMSR2
http://lance.nsstc.nasa.gov/
NASA Near Real-Time Data: https://earthdata.nasa.gov/earth-observation-data/near-real-time
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