Complications of Metadata Curation for NASA Airborne and Field Campaigns, Platforms, and Instruments

The Airborne Data Management Group (ADMG) curates metadata that describe NASA's airborne and field campaigns, platforms
and instruments. This activity is vital to building a useful inventory of sub-orbital Earth science data that improves data
discovery and access. During the curation process, many metadata issues were identified that required improvement to campaign
and data product metadata. In some cases, locating the needed metadata to add to the inventory was a simple process. For other
cases, the information was hard to find. In addition, identifying accurate investigation instrument details to add to the
inventory was especially complicated because of the variety of definitions used in the Earth science community for the same
concepts. One example of this is the concept of instruments' spatial and temporal resolution. The spatial resolution is one of the
more difficult elements to curate given the variations in meaning across various disciplines. Clarified definitions are needed to enable consistency of information across campaigns and instruments. In this presentation, we introduce results from a survey of
scientists from various fields in which we asked for definitions of spatial and temporal resolution. Our survey results highlight
the importance of creating more universally acceptable definitions for certain metadata elements. By curating sub-orbital field campaign and instrument metadata, ADMG is enabling more efficient discovery and access to NASA observations by allowing
science data users to search for certain clearly defined criteria and metadata values.