This project involves the development of a web-based tool to support ad-hoc international workgroups interested in global/regional-scale aerosols events such as forest fires, dust storms, air pollution transport episodes, and volcanoes. This tool will be made available to the international scientific community, disaster managers, and the lay public for use in detecting the occurrence of aerosol events, monitoring their evolution, and analyzing their impacts. The web-based tool is an XML-based system designed as a standard data description and transmission language/protocol and is capable of receiving queries and delivering XML data to any other computer on the Internet. A new data integration and browsing tool for exploration and presentation is being developed that allows the superposition of spatial and temporal data submitted by work group participants or generally available through the web. Data from the system can be distributed among servers who subscribe to a common sharing standards for data and metadata.
