The data, from one of the instruments on NASA's Terra satellite, provide observations of Africa's surface and atmosphere, including vegetation structure, airborne pollution particles, cloud heights and winds.

 

Transfer of this data to a distribution center in Africa will make it broadly accessible to African users who have not been able to remotely download the large data files because of limitations in the continent's internet infrastructure.

 

South Africa’s Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in Pretoria will distribute the data at no charge to the research community in the region. This forms part of CSIR's broad strategy of educating, training and transferring knowledge to the southern African research community.

 

Accessing a large volume of data is a major hurdle for research and applications in developing countries in general and Africa in particular. While internet connectivity in Africa has improved greatly in recent years, access and bandwidth remain too limited to support downloading vast data files. This led CSIR to host the data directly.

 

"The data transfer can be seen as a present from NASA to the newly-formed South African National Space Agency," said Bob Scholes, CSIR research group leader for ecosystem processes and dynamics. "It will kick-start a new generation of high-quality land surface products, with applications in climate change and avoiding desertification." Desertification is the gradual transformation of habitable land into desert due to climate change or destructive land use practices.

 

The data comes from the Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer (MISR) on the Terra satellite. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., built and manages the instrument, while NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., processes, archives and distributes the data.

 

MISR has been making continuous measurements of Earth’s surface and atmosphere for more than a decade. The satellite observes the sunlit portion of our planet continuously, viewing the entire globe between 82 degrees north and 82 degrees south latitude every nine days. Instead of viewing Earth from a single perspective, the instrument collects images from nine widely spaced view angles.

 

"NASA is committed to helping governments, organizations and researchers around the world make effective use of Earth observation data to aid in environmental decision making," said Hal Maring, a program manager in the Earth Science Division of the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "These efforts support the goals of the Group on Earth Observations, a partnership of international agencies that promotes collaborative use of Earth science data."