NASA's Interagency Implementation and Advanced Concepts Team (IMPACT) organized a data access and visualization workshop at the 2024 American Meteorological Society (AMS) annual meeting. It focused on how to best use NASA's Visualization, Exploration, and Data Analysis (VEDA) platform to work with datasets openly available through the U.S. Greenhouse Gas Center.
The 13 participants used a set of Jupyter Notebooks created for the workshop (available on the workshop website) to handle, analyze, and visualize greenhouse gas data in a cloud computing setting through science use cases. The workshop also included methods for accessing cloud-optimized data, configuring data for web visualizations, and communicating outcomes using a web dashboard.
The U.S. Greenhouse Gas Center is a curated collection of Earth science datasets. It provides insights into greenhouse gas sources, sinks, emissions, and fluxes. The Center focuses on three areas:
- Estimates of greenhouse gas emissions from human activities
- Naturally occurring greenhouse gas sources and sinks on land and in the ocean
- Large methane emission event identification and quantification, leveraging aircraft and space-based data
NASA is the lead implementing agency of the Center, in partnership with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Science experts from each of these U.S. federal agencies curated the Center's catalog of greenhouse gas datasets and analysis tools.
VEDA is an open-source science cyberinfrastructure for data processing, visualization, exploration, and geographic information systems (GIS) capabilities.
The VEDA platform was developed through a collaboration between IMPACT, NASA's Earth Science Data and Information System (ESDIS) Project, NASA's Science Managed Cloud Environment (SMCE), the NASA Mission Cloud Platform (MCP), Development Seed, the University of Alabama in Huntsville, Element 84, Indiana University, and the International Interactive Computing Collaboration (2i2c).
VEDA significantly reduces the barriers to accessing Earth science data and the computational resources needed for exploring and processing Earth data archives in the cloud.
U.S. Greenhouse Gas Center Resources
The U.S. Greenhouse Gas Center has a wide range of openly available resources:
- Jupyter Notebooks and Python code to access the datasets and analyses are available on the Center's Documentation website
- The source code is available on the Center's GitHub Organization Page
- Data available through the Center can be accessed through the Center's data catalog page
