1. Land Surface Study User wants soil moisture and brightness temperature data from a 2002 Iowa field campaign. They want to examine the soil moisture and brightness temperature data to extract simultaneous observations, and look at the data and its relationship to nearby topographical features and visualize the results. Although most of the data exploration should be optimally done online, they may want to export a temporal subset for local use.

2. Plan Find data Visualization tools Data download

3. Land Surface Scenario Find the data – General Google search “soil moisture brightness temperature iowa data”: directly points to http://nsidc.org/data/nsidc-0200.html page, entitled “SMEX02 SSM/I Brightness Temperature Data, Iowa”http://nsidc.org/data/nsidc-0200.html

4. Find data (continued) – Looks like the right place for the remote-sensing soil moisture (AMSR-E) and brightness temperature (SSM/I) data in Iowa in 2002. Metadata are available. Comments: for a non-specialist, it is not evident why we find the SSM/I and AMSR-E data on the same page (even if it suits well the scenario). It may not be evident for anyone that field campaign data can be found from validation soil moisture Not obvious OK +AMSR-E? Probably a place for “field campaign” data

5. Find data (continued) –Scenario mentions “field campaign” → trying validation data link “AMSR-E Validation Soil Moisture”. This points to “AMSR-E Validation – Soil Moisture Data” page. 2002 data are logically found under “SMEX02” In-situ soil moisture data found with doc Satellite brightness temperature data found with doc

6. Find data (continued) – Moisture data are provided in xls or ascii files. I did not find any visualization tool

7. Find data (continued) – Brightness temperature data are provided in ascii files. I did not find any visualization tool.

8. On-site visualization: no tool found Have to download data, extract simultaneous data, and plot them with own tools.