Talk:Goddard DAAC Air Pollution Event Search Tool

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Revision as of 01:20, March 23, 2006 by Stefan Falke (Sfalke) (talk | contribs)
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Your Mirador search interface using an event gazetteer is an interesting and potentially useful way to search for air quality data. The key air quality events include smoke from fires, dust plumes, and urban haze events. A good summary of air quality events is provided on an aerosol events site created by Rudy Husar, also with CAPITA at Washington University:

The NASA Earth Observatory has also cataloged images of dust, fire and smoke.

Querying by location, time and/or pollutant concentration is useful for researchers and others familiar with air quality data. But for people not familiar with what PM2.5 is or the significance of 65 ug/m3, searching by event type is useful. The challenge, as I'm sure you've encountered with the weather events, is how to characterize events for querying observation data. How does your search tool work? Can you provide an example of how a user might search for weather event data? Stefan Falke (Sfalke)