Technology in Water and Agriculture

Availability of NASA Data - Technology in Water and Agriculture

Mon, Mar 30, 2009

Excellent set of presentations we've had. So can I ask for questions from the floor? Yeah, please say your name and your affiliation.

My name's Duncan, I'm with the World Bank. I just wanted to ask the lady from NASA -- I'm sorry I didn't get your name.

Christa.

Christa. My name's, excuse me, my question to you is the extent to which the NASA technology, which I've seen a few times before, a lot of it is really exciting and all over the place to some extent. To what extent is that data going to be available to people in the field in countries other than the United States? Because my concern is a very great deal of this is U.S. government-led, and a lot of this data is going to be U.S.government-used, and not available to people that are working on the ground in places where a lot of this data would be useful, going forward. So you know, particularly the stuff that you have there on Africa, I've worked a lot in the Nile basin and we really do use this data, the rainfall modeling and the precipitation data, on a regular basis. But I'm concerned that some of this stuff is really exciting, and would be useful, but may not be available to the people that could use it most in the near-term, rather than the long-term.

Right. Great. Well, thank you for the question. NASA's data is available online all the time. So any of the data sets I mentioned are available. The issue comes when one tries to apply the data to a particular model or decision-support system. And so the way we've generally worked is with other agencies, and we've received funding from USAID and others to customize ways to combine our data with your system. And it could be, like for example there's a new initiative that started recently with the Arab Water Council. You may be aware of that, it was discussed at the World Water Forum last week, had a contingent there. And that's to develop an Arab land data assimilation system that is customized and unique to that region. So we do want to work with other agencies to get the data to you faster. Some of the things I showed are cutting-edge science, and they would take that kind of a directed effort to bring them more quickly. But then the general way we transition our work is through our partners, either at NOAH, Air Force Weather Agency, USGS, etc. So, you're right that it wouldn't immediately be in your hands, unless you wanted to figure out how to use the data yourself, which is, you know, that's really one of the reasons we're here, is to bring that capability to you. So great question, thanks.