Computer-based modeling and visualization have enabled dramatic advances in a broad range of scientific and engineering disciplines. The knitting together of the world's scientific community on the Internet has laid the foundation for the development of electronic collaboratories. At the same time, technologies for collecting data have swollen the quantity of Internet-available information to unmanageable levels. What is needed is a system to manage, retrieve and process scientific data. This revolutionary development, driven primarily from uncertainties and concerns about the role of human activities in changing the environment, has become increasingly linked to the expanding use of satellites to observe the earth.
Satellites give a uniquely comprehensive spatial and temporal view of the earth system.
A number of ambitious national and international reserarch programs have emerged, including major program of satellite observation begun or planned by the U.S., the Europen Space Agency, Japan, and India, but the unprecedented large volumes of satellite data, with ever accelerating rates of aacquisition, challenge our abilities to exploit their scientific potential. We are proposing an interdisciplinary collaboration that will result in a prototype Digital Atlas for oceanic, atmospheric and solid-earth sciences. A single environment that integrates the software required for their work. The Cornell Theory Center at Cornell University is one of four National Advanced Scientific Computing Centers supported by the National Science Foundation. The Theory Center receives major funding from the National Science Foundation and New York State, with additional support from ARPA, NIH, IBM Corporation and the members of the Corporate Research Institute.