Moving Code to the Data: Analyzing Sea Level Rise Using Earth Data in the Cloud

Nearly a petabyte of NASA’s Physical Oceanography Distributed Active Archive Center (PO.DAAC) data products have been moved to NASA’s Earthdata Cloud—hosted in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud. To maximize the full potential of cloud computing on Big Data, one needs to be familiar with not only the data products and their access methods, but also a new set of knowledge that comes with working in a cloud environment. This can be a daunting task for the majority of the science community, who may be familiar with high-performance computing, but not with AWS services. To aid end users in learning and to be successful during this paradigm shift, the PO.DAAC team has been exploring pathways toward practical solutions for research groups beyond data access and into data analysis in the cloud.

During this webinar, we will share some preliminary findings of this PO.DAAC work. We will assume participants have zero knowledge of AWS services and the Earthdata Cloud, and present a step-by-step walkthrough of exploring and discovering PO.DAAC data hosted in the Earthdata Cloud and applying AWS cloud computing to analyze global sea level rise from altimetry data and Estimating the Circulation and Climate of the Ocean (ECCO) products.