ORNL DAAC Mission Statement and Goals

The mission of the ORNL DAAC is to assemble, distribute, and provide data services for a comprehensive archive of terrestrial biogeochemistry and ecological dynamics observations and models to facilitate research, education, and decision-making in support of NASA's Earth Science.

ORNL DAAC Data and Data Services are used to:

• Understand terrestrial biogeochemical processes
• Assess the accuracy and uncertainty of remote sensing products
• Integrate process understanding within remote sensing observations
• Develop, assess, and drive biogeochemical models
• Educate future earth scientists
• Provide information for decision-making activities

ORNL DAAC's Goals are to:

• Serve as the primary active archive for biogeochemical dynamics data derived from NASA's field campaigns
• Provide field data to assess the accuracy and uncertainty of NASA's remote sensing products
• Work with NASA to develop best practices, tools, and training for data providers to generate terrestrial ecology and biogeochemical dynamics data for sharing and archival
• Archive and disseminate regional and global data products for modeling and analysis
• Archive and disseminate model source code to enable synthesis of results across modeling studies
• Work with NASA to develop and use the best available technology to organize and present data to users
• Facilitate interdisciplinary synthesis by providing and integrating diverse data required to address common hypothesis (across multiple scales, model-data intercomparison, etc.)

ORNL DAAC: A NASA EOSDIS Data Center

The Oak Ridge National Laboratory Distributed Active Archive Center (ORNL DAAC) for biogeochemical Dynamics is one of the NASA Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS) data centers managed by the Earth Science Data and Information System (ESDIS) Project, which is responsible for providing scientific and other users' access to data from NASA's Earth Science Missions. ORNL DAAC is operated by the ORNL Environmental Sciences Division and is responsible for data archival, product development and distribution, and user support for biogeochemical and ecological data and models.

ORNL DAAC: Supporting NASA Earth Science

NASA's Earth Sciences Division has built its Research and Analysis activity around a suite of six interdisciplinary science focus areas. The mission of the ORNL DAAC for Biogeochemical Dynamics falls within the Carbon Cycle and Ecosystems focus area, which addresses:

• the distribution and cycling of carbon among the active terrestrial, oceanic, and atmospheric reservoirs
• ecosystems as they are affected by human activity, as they change due to their own intrinsic biogeochemical dynamics, and as they respond to climatic variations and, in turn, affect climate.

ORNL DAAC: User Working Group
The ORNL DAAC User Working Group (UWG) provides guidance in the assembly of data and model products needed in biogeochemical studies to address global environmental change issues.