This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: All water comes from somewhere. Researchers who want to know where it comes from rely on water isotopes, variants of water molecules with slightly different masses, as location identifiers.
In particular, the specific ratio of heavy to light water isotopes is unique to the water's origin and processes it has undergone and can provide information on how water travels across the globe. From 2002 to the present, eight different satellite missions have been measuring the isotopes of water vapor around the planet, creating a rich data set of water's origins and movements. "Most scientists and satellite missions want to share data," said Mampi Sarkar, a research scientist at Rice University.
"But it's not always an easy task. Each satellite was designed to answer slightly different questions, so they have all different types of data even though they fundamentally measure the same thing. A giant collection of water isotope data was available, but there was no easy way for a researcher to use it." These differing data sets made combining and comparing data from the satellites labor intensive, which made getting a comprehensive look at all the data challenging.
Using data from two different satellites might mean a year spent cleaning and comparing the data sets before any analysis could be done. And since the data sets were kept in different locations, researchers around the world could be unknowingly replicating the labor-intensive work of reconciling the data sets. "There are so many things this data could be used for," said Sylvia Dee, associate professor of earth, environmental and planetary sciences at Rice.
"Satellites access regions that field researchers can't, and they're incredibly important for consistent, long-term data collection. But for this to become a solid resource capturing the enormity of the water cycle, we needed to be able to treat it like one data set." To solve this problem, Sarkar collaborated with experts in the U.S. (NASA), Europe and Japan to create an open database, published in Scientific Data. The database, called WISO-SAT, collected, standardized and cleaned all the data produced by these satellites over the past 24 years.
Each expert had experience with a particular satellite, ensuring that Sarkar had access to the data sets and information on how data from each satellite was collected and recorded. Once the raw data was collected, she carefully went through all of it to understand it, then built a pipeline to standardize and share it. Now, any researcher can open the WISO-SAT public database, compare data across the eight satellite missions and easily access information on how the data has been standardized.
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