Over the next decade, the NASA EOS platforms and other remote sensing satellites will be observing the Earth's oceans, lands and atmosphere and collecting data with volumes approaching a terabyte/day. It is expected that many different communities will have interest to access these data sets but with diverse goals and capabilities. For large data volumes, to facilitate data access, users need to obtain information on the content of data before they proceed to order data sets that may or may not serve theor needs. At GMU we have developed the concept and a working prototype for Virtual Domain Application Data Center (VDADC) (http://www.ceosr.gmu.edu/~vdadcp) to facilitate data access and querying. The VDADC maintains global L3 data sets supporting interdisciplinary Earth science and provides on-line analysis capabilities of these data sets.

As a follow-on and natural evolution of the prototype, we are presently working on a distributed data system designed to serve seasonal to interannual communities which include El Nino and Monsoon studies, teleconnection effects, as well as TRMM scientists and regional experiments. The main partners in this distributed system are George Mason University, the Center for Ocean, Land, Atmosphere Studies (COLA) and the NASA Goddard Distributed Active Archive Center (GDAAC). The system consists of a 3-node mini-federation and is part of NASA's Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP) program. The information technology implementation involves the 3 nodes using a multitiered client-server architecture. Data mining and database systems implementations driven by the needs of the science areas at hand will be presented, including a three phase data access and querying system which provides on-line analysis capabilities for efficient data mining. The SIESIP project is described at http://www.siesip.gmu.edu.

We will present results of the VDADC implementation and the more evolved, distributed S-I ESIP architecture, including visualization and statistical tools for exploratory data analysis and associated toolkits accesible via the WWW.