Welcome to the NSF Geosciences

Integrated Earth Information Server

This World Wide Web-based (WWW) Server is under construction and may change drastically from time to time. It contains references to other Unidata-based servers some of which are extremely popular network resources and therefore sometimes overloaded and inaccessible.

IEIS for a Global Vision

This server is a prototype Integrated Earth Information Server (IEIS, as in eyes on the globe). It is built on the infrastructure provided by the nation-wide Unidata Internet Data Distribution (IDD) network, in which participating universities have established information servers containing a range of earth-related data.

Perhaps the best recent example of an IEIS product is the "Global Montage" (seen in miniature above) which the SSEC at the University of Wisconsin creates every six hours in graphic form and as an animation of the last week's images (2 MB) .

IEIS make information available in a variety of forms; the list below illustrates some of these:

current local weather maps and bulletins (accessible only to NSF staff and visitors);
, instructional materials to complement the data

The information represented by the icons above is the result of a coordinated national effort among the roughly 125 universities that currently comprise the Unidata community. For more information on the Unidata Program click here.

How the IEIS Work

The information that appears on an IEIS arrives via the experimental nation-wide Unidata Internet Data Distribution (IDD) network, which automatically delivers real-time environmental observations from a variety of observing systems around the globe to servers at Unidata universities. At the heart of each server on each campus (and on this IEIS computer at NSF's Atmospheric Science Division) is a Unidata Local Data Manager (LDM), which captures the data and stores them as each site wishes. Sites may then use Unidata analysis and display programs to transform the data into easy-to-understand, familiar forms and to combine them with environmental data from other sources. As in the examples above, these form can then be made generally available on a university IEIS.

Providing Information As It Happens

Since this set of pages was established several years ago, Unidata universities have been establishing IEIS around the country to provide up-to-date environmental information. These sites have far exceeded what was original set up on this server as a demonstration of what is possible. The place to go now for demonstrations is to the university servers available under Servers in the Unidata Comminity.

Educational Infrastructure

As the IEIS prototypes evolved, the environmental information have been augmented with more instructional materials and lesson plans. The intent is to make the observational data immediately useful in educational programs at all levels. Regional science education coalitions, such as the one in Michigan, are already producing classroom materials for use with the real-time environmental information in earth science and mathematics classes. The University of Illinois has created a set of instructional modules for meteorology as part of their Weather World 2010. Much of this work was done in collaboration with Northwestern University on the COVIS Project. Another curriculum development project is the The Remote Sensing Core Curriculum..

Acknowledgements

The Unidata Program Center (UPC), operated by the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), is sponsored by the Atmospheric Sciences Division (ATM) of the National Science Foundation (NSF).

The hardware for this IEIS was donated to Unidata by Sun Microsystems to show how Unidata systems can be used for scientific research and education. Please read our acknowledgments document to see how many organizations have contributed to this effort.