MRSDS: Methane Research Science Data System(NPO-52074-1)

While methane observing systems are proliferating there remain serious gaps in terms of data systems and analytic frameworks that can fully exploit them. Through our collective exposure to remote-sensing based methane research and applied science we assess that currently there is no information system technology that can address the improvements in data analysis latency, discoverability, data fusion and on-demand analytics required by the research community and public and private sector decision makers. We propose to develop a Multi-scale Methane Analytic Framework (M2AF) that can help address one of the more persistent challenges in Earth System Science: understanding the causes for the changing atmospheric growth rate of methane. M2AF will lay the foundation for extending existing methane analysis systems beyond their current experimental states, reduce latency and cost of methane data analysis and improve accessibility by researchers and decision makers. To meet these needs M2AF will advance and uniquely bring together multiple observational data sets, models and analysis methods to estimate methane fluxes across three key, overlapping spatial scales in order to disentangle confounding processes: 1) global to regional scale, 2) regional to local scale, and 3) facility (point source scale). M2AF will offer workflow optimization and management tools to improve automation, data search and discovery tools for improved access to intermediate and final products, as well as on-demand analytics and web- based tools for interacting with diverse data sets. MRSDS is the output of the M2AF project.