Company Background:
Interactive Multi-Satellite Search Tool

This tool, shown below, was developed in the early 1990s to allow Earth-science researchers to quickly and intuitively locate specific data subsets from large (usually 100+ Gigabyte) daily satellite data files.

This tool was ground-breaking because subsets from multiple satellites could be quickly identified simultaneously without requiring the satellite's data files. This was accomplished by visually combining small datasets that described the satellite's orbital paths with small Earth-science datasets that featured a desired area of interest. The tool then allowed researchers to quickly correlate the interest area with the exact subset of the large satellite files they'd need for their work. These subset satellite files were significantly smaller, by a factor of nearly 100,000 times, allowing researchers to easily manipulate them on typical desktop workstations for further processing.

Unique to this tool was its ability to search the datasets according to their own space-time characteristics, allowing researchers to use data as-is without any front-end requirements for preprocessing to a common spatial or temporal grid. This ability is important when searching real-time or unprocessed data.

This tool was enthusiastically received by researchers as it allowed simple and exact Internet-based satellite data retrieval without requiring extremely long download periods.

The Interactive Multi-Satellite Search Tool, with coverage footprints for the SSM/I (red outline) and the AVHRR (green outline) satellites, ground-strike lightning events (yellow/black dots), and precipitation from composite US NWS radar (blue-green-red color scale).  By using satellite coverage algorithms, the tool allowed researchers to quickly and intuitively find the desired subset of large satellite data files, for instance, data containing the above-shown Southeastern U.S. storm.