The Regional Center for NASA EOSDIS
The Regional Center for NASA EOSDIS is a joint project of ISA (Israel Space Agency), IUCC (Inter University Computation Center) and NASA, established in order to create and maintain an Earth observing data center available through the internet to the Israeli researchers, to the general public, and to the outside world. The center was established as part of NASA's Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS) interoperable network.
NASA established nine regional EOSDIS nodes outside of the US which interconnect Canada, Japan, England, Russia and Europe to the eight data centers within the US. The Israeli node is part of this network. By 2002, the EOSDIS global archives already contain more than 450 data products, occupying over 2 petabytes (1 petabyte = 1012 bytes).

NASA's EOSDIS node in Israel enables users in Israel to access Earth data from the US and from other participating data centers. Similarly, international users have access via the worldwide Internet to complementary data sets archived at the Israeli node. These data sets include detailed assessments and forecasts of atmospheric variables such as temperature, wind, humidity, clouds, dust, ozone, other aerosols and gases over the Middle-East as well as earth surface fields like land-cover, soil moisture, and vegetation. Potential applications are for scientific research, decision-making, agriculture, industry, commerce and more.

The ISA-MEIDA project was initiated during the NASA HQ delegation visit to Israel on July 1996. A visit that followed President Clinton's promise to the late Prime-Minister Yizhaq Rabin in summer 1995. The Regional Center for NASA EOSDIS was officially inaugurated on April 27, 1999 by the Minister of Science, Mr. Silvan Shalom. Opening remarks were given by President of Tel-Aviv University, Prof. Yoram Dinstein, followed with remarks by the Director of the Israel Space Agency, Mr. Aby Hareven. Videotaped greetings from NASA's Associate Administrator for Earth Science Dr. Gassem Asrar were shown, followed by an address by Dr. Yoram Kaufman, also of NASA. The Center was then presented by its nominated Head, Prof. Pinhas Alpert of Tel-Aviv University.

The Center currently has the following services available :

  • The ISA-IDEAS user friendly interactive sub-setting and plot-production system to the data held by ISA-MEIDA.
  • A connection to the international EOSDIS system, and thus to the data products in the U.S and the other nodes.
  • Israel Meteorological service observations for the years 1989-2000 (only some of the stations are available on-line).
  • Data from the Israel Ministry of Environment Air Quality Monitoring system for the years 2001 to april 2002.
  • A subset of the NASA / Goddard Reanalysis (GEOS-1), specifically processed to include only the Middle-East region.
  • Results of the MM5 weather forecasting model run by TAU-WeRC, from November 2000.
  • Results of the Dust loading forecast model run by TAU-WeRC, from July 2000.
  • A subset of the NOAA satellites' AVHRR instrument observations, especially processed for our region.
  • Data and lists of Israeli meteorological stations which do not belong to the Meteorological service.

Funding to ISA-MEIDA is provided by the Ministry of Science - Israel Space Agency (ISA)
The project is supported by Machba - Israel Inter University Computation Center (IUCC) 


For more information: 
Israel Space Agency Inter-University Computer Center National Aero-Space Agency Earth Observing System Data and Information System
Counter:  Scientific manager: Amnon Stupp

© ISA-MEIDA, 1998-2006
Last update : 23 August 2006