Launched in November 1997, TRMM is a joint project between NASA and Japan's National Space Development Agency (NASDA). The satellite collects data related to tropical rainfall and other atmospheric phenomena for use in weather forecasting, climatological studies, and agricultural predictions.

TRMM is the first mission of NASA's Earth Science Enterprise program that will be providing data to the public via the Internet within 24-48 hours of its collection.

"TRMM represents a new way of doing business at NASA," said Chris Kummerow, NASA's lead TRMM Project Scientist. "The satellite is generating 30-40 GB of new remote sensing data per day.

"The initial access and analysis of TRMM data is not limited to a small group of principal investigators, as has usually been the case, but is available to anyone with an Internet connection. This approach has the potential to stimulate Earth science research to new levels."

TRMM is also the first satellite in the Earth Science Enterprise program to distribute data in the Hierarchical Data Format (HDF), a public data standard. HDF has been adopted by NASA for TRMM and other Earth science missions to give scientists consistent access to data.

"Most scientists currently spend a large portion of their time accessing research data due to incompatible formats between software and hardware platforms," stated Ted Meyer, ex-NASA official and now CEO of Fortner Software.

"NASA has changed the landscape by providing data collections in a single format, HDF. Using analysis tools fine- tuned to HDF, like Fortner Software's Noesys application, researchers can quickly access and better utilize the data. With NASA planning on providing thousands of gigabytes of remote sensing data daily, the ability to quickly analyze this data is crucial."

Fortner's Noesys software, available for Windows and Power Macintosh, offers a low cost solution to access, manipulate, and visualize science data in an easy-to-use environment.

With Noesys, data can be quickly scanned and verified, subsetted to identify areas of interest, and visualized as graphs, images and 3D animations. Global data sets can be mapped to a variety of earth projections and viewed at any angle.

Using Noesys and Earth science data such as TRMM, scientists are able to analyze cloud patterns, detect fish concentrations in oceans, analyze crop productivity, measure forest growth, study sea surface temperatures related to El Nino, visualize ozone concentrations in the upper atmosphere, and more.

Noesys desktop software lets anyone from academic researchers to commercial organizations perform data analysis comparable to that of leading scientists using high-end workstations.