# NASA Global Satellite and Model Data Products and Services for Tropical Meteorology and Climatology
## 6 Future Plans
Nonetheless, there are a lot of things that data services can deliver. These so-called analysis ready data can greatly facilitate research and applications by reducing time and efforts in data download and processing. Data interoperability needs to be enhanced or developed. For example, GIS users prefer data in GeoTIFF and model users prefer data in a projection and grid that match those of their models. NetCDF is a format that is used in most datasets at GES DISC and many tools or software can take this format without major issues. However, minor issues still exist such as missing metadata, lat-lon order,and time dimension, which can be major issues for developing engineering solutions for Earth science data and additional preprocessing components need to be added (which may drive up the development and operational costs). These days, data centers increasingly consider moving datasets and services to the cloud environment, particularly for those that have service scale-up issues on premises. Downloading the voluminous IMERG suite can easily overload on-premises systems that can impact data service performance. Moving the data services to the cloud environment appears to be a solution for this scale-up challenge. However, the egress issue (cost to data providers for downloading data outside the cloud) can be challenging because it adds additional cost to operations and can be out of control. GES DISC, similar to other DAACs, is experimenting with new cloud-based services for IMERG and MERRA-2 datasets. Data analysis and visualization tools need to be enhanced as well. Over the years, over 1000 referral papers have been published with help from Giovanni [20]. Giovanni not only provides quick evaluation for many Level-3 datasets but also helps answering what-if questions [21]. However, additional improvements are still needed. First, Level-2 data need to be added to Giovanni for case studies and more. Then, data analysis and visualization need to be linked with event databases as a user-friendly feature. For example, the NOAA hurricane track database (HURDAT2) [57] can be made available so users can analyze and visualize data for hurricane studies in a convenient way. There are some challenges for Giovanni to add such a feature. New components need to be developed to handle hurricane tracks and data subsetting. An event picker in the graphic user interface (GUI) needs to be added as well. Initial data analysis functions can be a time-averaged map, area-averaged time series, and animation. All these function names already exist in Giovanni, but for a moving system, new functions need to be developed. Giovanni is also facing a service scale-up issue. Over the years, more and more users are using Giovanni for their research work, pushing the on-premises servers to their limit. Moving Giovanni into the cloud environment is being implemented at GES DISC. Initial test results have shown significant improvement in performance for data analysis. As data are migrating from all DAACs to the cloud environment, more data will be available for Giovanni. Users will see more datasets from different DAACs available in Giovanni, which will definitely enhance the capabilities for interdisciplinary or cross-DAAC data analysis. Conceptualization, Z.L. ; formal analysis, Z.L. and C.-L.S. ; writing--original draft preparation, Z.L. ; writing--review and editing, Z.L., C.-L.S., A.L. and D.M. ; visualization, Z.L. ; project administration, D.M. and A.L. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript. This work was funded by NASA's Science Mission Directorate (SMD). We would like to acknowledge all supporting scientists and engineers at GES DISC for developing and maintaining robust data services for the user community. We thank dataset principal investigators, collaborators, the user working group and users for their feedback and suggestions that help improving data services. GES DISC is funded by NASA's Science Mission Directorate (SMD). The authors declare no conflict of interest.