The EIS adopts a global perspective and explores science in an end-to-end manner. It must, therefore, support extremely diverse data sets, from observations to predictive models of the earth, oceans, and atmosphere, and it must be capable of assessing both current and proposed policy decisions. The architecture involves a suite of simplified layers, each building on the layers below it. Bottom-up, these layers are data access, visualization, interactive visualization, analysis and discovery, forecast and prediction, and interactive analysis. Besides supporting research applications, the EIS will support time-critical applications, especially those requiring emergency response. The EIS will provide a framework into which applications can plug-in. It will support distributed data and code sharing similar to that pioneered by the OpeNDAP and OpenGIS Consortium technology. A library of primitives will use conventions at each layer of functionality, and event-driven tools will be available for encoding interrelationships and operations on the data, allowing the framework to be easily applied and extended.
The following are links to documents providing more information on EIS.
For more information on EIS, contact Tracy Lee Hansen (Tracy.L.Hansen@noaa.gov), NOAA Earth Systems Research Laboratory (ESRL).
For information on SEAMONSTER, a possible EIS prototype, click here.