The US space agency NASA and CSIRO agreed this week to exchange environmental data obtained by satellite.

Australian researchers will now have better access to NASA's Mission to Planet Earth, described as the world's largest scientific undertaking.

Dr Brian Embleton, Head of the CSIRO Office of Space Science & Applications, said that NASA and CSIRO have agreed on a common system to exchange satellite derived information.

"Earth-observing satellites generate terabytes - millions of millions of pieces of computer data - each year," said Dr Embleton. "Just keeping track of what information is available is a major task in itself."

Dr Embleton said that NASA's Mission to Planet Earth is an ambitious plan to combine information from many sources - ground instruments, aircraft, and satellites - in an effort to uncover global change, and to try to distinguish between what is due to natural variation and what is due to human intervention.

Under the agreement between CSIRO and NASA, both can now use the same tools - developed by NASA - to archive, retrieve and exchange satellite and other information on global change.

"International scientific cooperation helps to build a global picture of environmental trends," said Dr Embleton. "It is more cost-effective than each organisation duplicating observations, or developing different data management systems".

This will benefit primary producers, city planners, coastal engineers, environmental policy-makers and others whose work requires better predications of the effect of changes in the atmosphere or oceans.

Mission to Planet Earth: http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/mtpe/
CSIRO Satellite Information: http://atlas.eoc.csiro.au:8000/~imswww/pub/imswelcome/index.html
More information: Jeff Kingwell CSIRO 06 2167224