NASA Earth Exchange

NASA Earth Exchange
Name	NASA Earth Exchange
Formation	2010
Type	Research collaboration platform
Headquarters	Ames Research Center
Parent organization	NASA

NASA Earth Exchange NASA Earth Exchange is a cloud-based collaborative research platform that integrates high-performance computing, scientific datasets, and community-developed models to advance Earth science research. It brings together researchers, institutions, and agencies to accelerate analyses related to climate change, land surface processes, hydrology, and remote sensing. The initiative fosters partnerships among federal laboratories, universities, and international organizations to translate observational and modeling capabilities into actionable knowledge.

Overview

The platform combines resources from Ames Research Center, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Goddard Space Flight Center, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and partner universities such as University of California, Berkeley, Stanford University, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It supports studies that link datasets from missions like Landsat program, Terra (satellite), Aqua (satellite), Suomi NPP, and ICESat-2 with models including the Community Earth System Model, WRF model, and CLM (climate model). Users include scientists affiliated with NASA Postdoctoral Program, National Center for Atmospheric Research, University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, and international agencies such as the European Space Agency.

History and Development

Conceived at Ames Research Center in the late 2000s, the platform emerged from collaborations involving NASA research centers and computing initiatives like Amazon Web Services pilot projects and the NASA Advanced Supercomputing Division. Early demonstrations built on datasets from the MODIS instrument and workflows developed by groups at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Over time, partnerships expanded to include academic consortia like the Earth Science Information Partners and large-scale computing collaborations such as the XSEDE program. Major milestones intersect with events involving the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, multinational research campaigns, and community model intercomparison projects.

Platform and Resources

The computational backbone leverages high-performance computing resources originally associated with the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facility and cloud-hosted services interoperable with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and research infrastructures linked to Open Science Grid. Storage integrates curated holdings from archives such as the Earth Observing System Data and Information System and reanalysis products from NOAA PSL and ECMWF. Data management, provenance, and collaboration tools are informed by practices used at institutions like California Institute of Technology, Carnegie Institution for Science, and University of Washington.

Data and Tools

The repository includes multi-decadal remote sensing records from Landsat program, MODIS, VIIRS, and lidar datasets akin to ICESat-2. It houses climate reanalyses comparable to ERA5 and MERRA-2 alongside socioeconomic datasets sourced in collaboration with partners such as United Nations agencies and research groups at Columbia University. Analysis toolkits available on the platform parallel ecosystems like Python (programming language) scientific stacks, R (programming language) packages, and pipelines akin to Apache Spark and Jupyter Notebook workflows. Community models and software components include implementations of Community Land Model, WRF, and custom workflows developed by teams at University of Maryland, Yale University, and Princeton University.

Collaborative Projects and Partnerships

Project portfolios span collaborations with federal entities such as NOAA, USGS, and EPA (United States Environmental Protection Agency), and academic partnerships with University of California, Santa Barbara, Cornell University, and University of Michigan. International collaborations involve groups from CSIRO, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, and University of Oxford. The platform has supported multi-institutional efforts like model intercomparison projects, hazard mapping initiatives linked to United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, and urban resilience studies involving municipal partners such as the City and County of San Francisco.

Impact and Applications

Applications include regional climate projections used in assessments alongside the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, land-cover change analyses informing conservation efforts by organizations like World Wildlife Fund and The Nature Conservancy, and hydrologic forecasts that complement operational products from NOAA National Weather Service. The platform has informed peer-reviewed studies authored by researchers at Princeton University, Harvard University, and University of California, Los Angeles on topics ranging from carbon fluxes to wildfire risk. It also underpins capacity-building programs with entities like NASA DEVELOP and educational collaborations with institutions such as Arizona State University.

Governance and Access

Governance structures draw on organizational models from NASA, the National Science Foundation, and institutional review practices at partner universities including Massachusetts Institute of Technology and University of California, Berkeley. Access policies balance open data principles promoted by U.S. Office of Management and Budget guidance and stewardship obligations consistent with agreements involving NOAA and USGS. Participation mechanisms include peer-reviewed project proposals, affiliation through member institutions like Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Goddard Space Flight Center, and cooperative agreements modeled after those used by National Laboratories and academic consortia.

Category:NASA