Provenance tracking in an earth science data processing system

Abstract

NASA and other organizations involved with climate research have captured huge archives of earth observations. The sensors, spacecraft, and science algorithms for transforming and analyzing the data and the processing frameworks are evolving over time. Science Data Processing Systems (SDPSes) should capture, archive, and distribute provenance information of all externally received data and algorithms, as well as describing all internal processes used for data transformation. This will make the data sets produced by the systems easier to understand, enable independent scientific reproducability, and ultimately, increase the credibility of the scientific research that makes use of those data sets.