# NASA Global Satellite and Model Data Products and Services for Tropical Meteorology and Climatology
## 6 Future Plans  
Future plans include two parts, new datasets and data services. New datasets, as mentioned earlier, comprise those from to-be-launched TROPICS and the in-planning ACCP. Details about the datasets from these missions are not available as of the time of this writing. A new development idea is to integrate datasets from missions or projects archived and distributed at other DAACs. For example, SST and ocean surface wind datasets at PODAAC [42] could be integrated with datasets at GES DISC such as precipitation, air temperature, humidity, etc. On-the-fly datasets are also useful for users such as a 10 day precipitation dataset derived from IMERG that could be helpful to support monitoring activities in agriculture. There are a number of areas to be improved in data services. First, a dataset search at GES DISC requires additional improvements. For example, results from a search for \"precipitation\" for a specific area and time range return datasets that are outside the search criteria. For Level-2 dataset search, steps need to be reduced for searching how many granules are available for the search criteria (e.g., spatial and temporal ranges). These features are very important for case studies. For instance, to investigate the weather conditions associated with the Air France 447 accident [55], one needs to first identify the area of the accident and time span. With this spatial and temporal information in the dataset search interface, the search results should contain all the measurements or model datasets available for the event investigation, other than search each dataset one at a time, which can be time consuming and difficult because one needs to know what to search at the start, compared to what are available in the search results. Spatial subsetting needs to be expanded to include popular shaped-files such as river basins and land-sea masks and allow users to upload their own shape-files. As mentioned earlier, research in tropical meteorology and climatology often involves multiple disciplines. However, at present, satellite- and model-based datasets are archived and distributed by disciplines at discipline-oriented DAACs. Efforts are underway to better understand use cases and requirements for interdisciplinary data and services and design systems to meet such requirements including a dedicated session in Earth Informatics in the AGU Fall Meeting [56]. In addition, the prototype of Datalist can be further expanded to other research areas such as floods, droughs, MJOs, not limited to datasets from GES DISC. Nowadays, the data volume can grow rapidly. The whole collection of the half-hourly IMERG dataset (e.g., Final Run) can have files over 350,000 over a 20 year time span as of this writing and continues growing. Event databases such as the NOAA Hurricane Center's hurricane data (HURDAT2) [57] need to be added to data search and ordering services. Track-based (e.g., hurricane tracks) data search is a desired feature that can reduce data download volume and facilitate research on a moving system such as cyclones. Such data services should also allow users to input their system or event tracks. Adding a collection of existing training data for AI/ML can facilitate data access for artificial intelligence (AI) or machine learning (ML). However, creating AI/ML training datasets for events can be costly and time consuming (e.g., identifying and labeling dust storms from MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) true color (RGB) imagery). Efforts are being considered, including using citizen scientists to create labeled event image databases. Conditional dataset search can be a useful feature to have. Users will be able to obtain the only data they want (e.g., meeting the conditions they set in the search box). For example, a user plans to study rainfall events with daily accumulation over 100 mm in the area of interest and would like to obtain the data for such events from the archive. In addition, conditions can be set with another variable or variables.