Selected Comments from the 2011 User Satisfaction Survey

1. Selected Comments from the 2011 User Satisfaction Survey Compiled by James Acker, GES DISC, Wyle IS LLC

2. Background • Annual Customer Satisfaction Surveyconducted by CFI Group on behalf of NASA • Customers are invited to participate by email • Survey has questions allowing numerical ratings, guided response, and open comments • Responses are anonymous • This year, we added customers who had queried the Help Desk about Giovanni

3. General impressions • Most of the responses are very positive • Some responses compare GES DISC favorably to other data centers • A large number of responses concern Giovanni and Mirador • Several comments suggest improvements and additions to our services

4. The Happy Customers • “GIOVANNI and MIRADOR are excellent” • “Giovanni is a good visualization tool. You can choose the spatial window and the temporal dataset.” • “GIOVANNI is a great service -easy to use, find data and do some preliminary investigation plus download the required data” • “Giovanni is excellent for my application.” • “In general the product services are very good. I like ASCII data. However, I understand that the large pool of data cannot be formatted in ASCII because of their size. So its OK to have HDF files, as long as we have extracting tools. Mirador is better than its previous version. I thank the GES-DISC team for their kind service.”

5. The Happy Customers, II • “I'm finding what I need and I'm quite happy with the availability and accessibility of data at the GES DISC. In my opinion, the GES DISC is the best provider of data for the atmospheric sciences, both in terms of ease of use and breadth of data available. Keep up the good work.” • “I found Giovanni very easy to use. I particularly liked the ability to make a spatially averaged time-series.” • “I use GIOVANNI platform for atmospheric data (aerosol, water vapor, ozone, etc.) and the search method is very intuitive. Really a great tool.” • “The search methods available are sufficiently powerful and intuitive, and the organization seems logical to me. I've had no problems finding and accessing the data I've searched for. I cannot think of any unavailable search methods that I would prefer.” • “Thank you so much for helping and serving the whole scientific community and hence the whole mankind ...”

6. By comparison: • “Giovanni was great with its intuitive GUI. Other NASA sites less easy to navigate or locate the data of interest.” • “I best like the Mirador search engine because I experienced a fast access. The LAADS system sometimes takes some time to process the orders, even though no additional post-processing is needed.” • “The GES DISC distribution of the MERRA data is hands-down the best service I have used and I have used ALL of the other DISCs. The reason is the on-the-fly subsetting feature … I would hope that this service can be extending in the future to all of the large NASA satellite data products including those from MODIS, AIRS, and AMSR-E. It truly opens up the doors for many users who only have limited storage and/or transfer speeds.” • “It would be very useful and more quick to choose a geographic area (as in GIOVANNI) also to download the Ocean Color products (level 3 and level 2)”

7. What I’d like to see • “GIOVANNI is great. Content is logically organised. One search aspect that would be useful is to have an option when selecting >1 pixel size to either extract an average for the area selected (as is currently the case) OR to extract for example time series data per pixel in the area selected, i.e. not to average the values but provide data per pixel for the area selected.” • “I have used Giovanni the most. It is very well organized. One feature I would like to see added is the ability to download data, manipulate it using an algorithm, and upload it for plotting an image of the data field.” • “I used the A-Train instance to get MODIS AOD and CALIPSO information. I wanted the information for a month, but could only select one day at a time. It would be nice to select all A-Train information for an entire month instead of just a certain distance along the groundtrack for one day.”

8. Constructive Criticism I • “Giovanni is SUPERB! So is also GloVis. Giovanni's data distribution in ascii format helps many researchers to get it ported to different platforms....provides immense possibilities. … Wonder if there could be some shift in NASA's current focus on providing data in HDF/NetCDF format, and if the data could be provided in GeoTiff format for many useful data, or even in the ascii format, like it did for the old AVHRR-PAL data in good old days.” • “I like Giovanni. However, it will be much more useful if I can download both spatial and temporal subsets at the same time.” • “It would be nice to have a separate area to access GIS files. Right now, .shp files aren't availavle for the TRMM data that I need.”

9. Constructive Criticism II • “My responses are general, and for some products the system works better than for others. for example, AIRS documentation is excellent, while CERES documentation is not very good. it would be good if Giovanni did lat/lon averages of the MLS level-2 data. My suggestion is to improve the user interphase, with a more friendly menu for the selection of products in order to be available for all kind of users, with or without experience in data requesting.” • “With GIOVANNI, sometimes the links to the documentation does not go straight to the parameter selected. It would be nice if I clicked on, for example, OMI Aerosol Index in the A-Train Instance and it would go straight to that entry in the OMI documentation. I recall that I had to go searching to find it, beyond where the link sent me.”

10. Constructive Criticism III • “Tutorials on how to use the data, including technical aspects of handling the data should be prepared and made available to users outside USA. For example, in India one or two suitable institutes could be assigned the task of handling different types of data from NASA. The more young profesionals will use the available very useful data.” • “Tools to read and write data requires improvement, especially those handles binary data formats.” • “There are too many data formats of the products. It's better to use an unified format for all products and provide a good software package to users.”

11. It’d be really nice if… • "It's not difficult to find data. But it's hard to get data without haze or noise. So please eliminate the haze or let me know how to eliminate that.“ • “Can Giovanni be possibly further extended to include OH, isoprene etc ?” • “Maximum possible longest dataset with high resolution in binary and NetCDF format along with the full details of data description (meta data) may kindly provided against each data.” • “To summarise, I shall appreciate receiving the currently provided HDF data in GeoTiff format. Also, I would like that Giovanni expands its service to include processing of the daily station data on weather conditions.”

12. It’d be really nice if… • “Our applications are mostly near real time. If there is anything that can be done to make data latency as low as possible this is the greatest imporovement that can be made for our applications.” • “Can be done it in Castilian?” • “PORFAVOR FACILITENNOS LAS COSAS A LOS DE HABLA CASTELLANA PLEASE Give us THINGS TO SPEAKING CASTELLANA”

13. Summary • There are very few negative comments about GES DISC data and services • Some comments want our current services extended • The general tone of the comments is positive, and at times, laudatory