Title: Moving Object Database Technology for Ad-Hoc Querying and Satellite Data Retrieval of Dynamic Atmospheric Events
Primary Author: Shen-Shyang Ho
Organization: Jet Propulsion Lab
Co-Author(s): Markus Schneider, Shen-Shyang Ho, Tao Chen, Arif Khan, W. Timothy Liu, Wenqing Tang, and Ganesh Viswanathan

Abstract:
Existing state-of-the-art and web-based weather event information portals, data archives, and forecast services provide excellent subsetting and visualizations of weather events and satellite sensor measurements. However, users only obtain limited, simple, and hard-coded query, retrieval, and analysis capabilities from these sources. One non-existent but desirable capability is the accurate and efficient ad-hoc querying of the trajectories of dynamic atmospheric events (e.g., tropical cyclones, hurricanes) as well as the efficient retrieval of Earth science satellite sensor data for these events based on ad-hoc, user defined criteria and the event trajectories.

In this paper, we describe our current work and progress in the development of a sophisticated framework based on moving objects database technology for ad-hoc querying and retrieval of atmospheric events and their associated satellite measurements. Such a capability is extremely important to scientists who process sensor data of atmospheric events for statistical analysis and scientific investigation. Some query examples including those derived from published journal papers that require search, retrieval, and analysis of satellite data containing cyclone features, are listed below and can be answered by our technology:

1.Retrieve TRMM precipitation data for tropical cyclones that attained tropical storm intensity or higher over western North Pacific and the South China Sea between longitudes 100E and 180.
2.Retrieve TRMM precipitation data for tropical cyclones from December 1997 to December 2003.
3.Retrieve QuikSCAT 25km resolution wind vector and 50km resolution global wind vector for tropical cyclones in western North Pacific which formed west of 160E and south of 26N from September 1999 to December 2004.
4.Retrieve QuikSCAT wind vectors and TRMM precipitation data for all tropical cyclones with translation speed faster than 7 meter/second.