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Global Climate Change Digest
A Guide to Information on Greenhouse Gases and Ozone Depletion
Published July 1988 through June 1999

FROM VOLUME 5, NUMBER 6, JUNE 1992

NEWS...
NASA DATA SYSTEM

Item #d92jun102

NASA's satellite-based Earth Observing System (EOS), the core of the U.S. Global Change Research Program, will produce an enormous amount of data that must be archived and made easily available for research. The current plans for managing this unprecedented task through the EOS Data and Information System (EOSDIS) have come under fire from at least two directions. (See Reports/Earth System Science.) The General Accounting Office, in an investigation requested by Rep. George Brown, chairman of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, warned in a Feb. 25, 1992, report that NASA has not adequately specified the technologies necessary for EOSDIS, and that it should delay awarding a contract for developing the system. The following day, a NASA administrator told a Senate subcommittee that the report was "fundamentally flawed." (See Science, p. 1206, Mar. 6, 1992; Intl. Environ. Rptr., pp. 142-143, Mar. 11; New Scientist, p. 22, Mar. 7.)

An interim report released April 20 by a special panel of the National Research Council supports the schedule for procuring a contractor for EOSDIS, but finds major shortcomings in NASA's plans for the system.