JimH: time for artistic communication?
Time is very limited at the moment. Everything is in public domain, unrestricted. Loved that ASIB picture of that crack cricket team going to bat for us on climate change.
a "friendlier" image archive for ASAR and Sentinel?
Not really. Twenty years into the internet, many thousands of image servers, yet ours remain "works in progress", in software terms barely in beta. There are two issues, developing the archive feed and serving it. The former has pipeline dependability, resizing and reprojecting, storage, and file size issues that are not trivial. This, along with crucial product algorithm versioning, drains all their energy.
It's better to work backwards from the front end. I could fix the server side on any of these in a new york minute but hardly any of the portals have a mechanism for user input, ie
they don't want it. Months go by with no response to a polite email suggesting a trivial but significant fix. And the fix never happens.
Ultimately it's all about serving the user community; some of them know a whole more about easy interfaces than programmers. And that's the problem in a nutshell: the programmers wants to do it THEIR way even though it's wrong and they're working for the public on the public's dime.
Nasa Worldview is a case in point. They are fairly close to one-stop shopping and importantly just added an animation tool (lower left corner) Great. It doesn't bomb but doesn't work right either: some of the channels, like band 31, are all but useless without palette compression but those settings STILL get dropped in making an animation.
A bonehead programming move early on, now set in stone. It happens, but it
can be fixed. Meanwhile parameter & channel tracking has
all been done a zillion times before via relational databases eg MySQL and even better lots of people can and will explain just how to do it.
ESA? The absolute worst for content-free babble, the user goes around and around trying to get past launch pad videos, silly registrations, copyright threats and superficial link-free prose trying to find the frigging imagery (ultimately furnished in an obscure abandoned format not allowing extraction by corner specification). The prose is is a matter of inadequately supervised non-science writers not told who the target audience is and not empowered to do anything if somehow they were allowed user feedback.
Case in point: the new integration of SMOS and CryoSat. Great: thick, medium, thin ice and open water better any one alone. So they serve ONE date but
no link to an archive! I don't even look any more -- there won't be a link as this would never occur to a non-user writer, a contact email will go to a dead letter box of someone not in a position to fix anything.
Do we still have the luxury of playing in little sandboxed siloes as events unfold a lot more rapidly than envisioned? We are poorly prepared for efficient evaluation of rapidly unravelling climate. Too much time has been spent on scenario ensembles that we now know to be irrelevant and too little on the unpleasant ones that need to be immediately explored in depth.
It is far better to spend a lot for one good programmer's time than waste daily ten thousand scientists' time at poorly laid-out data portals.