OpenAltimetry - rapid analysis and visualization of Spaceborne altimeter data
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RESEARCH ARTICLE
OpenAltimetry - rapid analysis and visualization of Spaceborne altimeter data Siri Jodha S. Khalsa 1 & Adrian Borsa 2 & Viswanath Nandigam 3 & Minh Phan 3 & Kai Lin 3 & Christopher Crosby 4 & Helen Fricker 2 & Chaitan Baru 3 & Luis Lopez 1 Received: 24 February 2020 / Accepted: 31 August 2020 # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract NASA’s Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2) carries a laser altimeter that fires 10,000 pulses per second towards Earth and records the travel time of individual photons to measure the elevation of the surface below. The volume of data produced by ICESat-2, nearly a TB per day, presents significant challenges for users wishing to efficiently explore the dataset. NASA’s National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) Distributed Active Archive Center (DAAC), which is responsible for archiving and distributing ICESat-2 data, provides search and subsetting services on mission data products, but providing interactive data discovery and visualization tools needed to assess data coverage and quality in a given area of interest is outside of NSIDC’s mandate. The OpenAltimetry project, a NASA-funded collaboration between NSIDC, UNAVCO and the University of California San Diego, has developed a web-based cyberinfrastructure platform that allows users to locate, visualize, and download ICESat-2 surface elevation data and photon clouds for any location on Earth, on demand. OpenAltimetry also provides access to elevations and waveforms for ICESat (the predecessor mission to ICESat-2). In addition, OpenAltimetry enables data access via APIs, opening opportunities for rapid access, experimentation, and computation via third party applications like Jupyter notebooks. OpenAltimetry emphasizes ease-of-use for new users and rapid access to entire altimetry datasets for experts and has been successful in meeting the needs of different user groups. In this paper we describe the principles that guided the design and development of the OpenAltimetry platform and provide a highlevel overview of the cyberinfrastructure components of the system. Keywords Cyberinfrastructure . Data visualization . Data discovery . Altimetry . ICESat-2
Introduction The increasing complexity and size of Earth sciences datasets calls for better ways to access, visualize, analyze and understand the data that is being generated. In addition, Earth observation data is increasingly being used to inform decision making
Communicated by: H. Babaie * Siri Jodha S. Khalsa [email protected] 1
University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA
2
Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA
3
University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA
4
UNAVCO, Boulder, CO, USA
regarding pressing environmental and societal issues, driving the need for intuitive data interfaces that support the needs of non-expert users (Kavvada et al. 2020). One of the challenges facing NASA’s Earth Science Data and Information Systems (ESDIS) is that the innovative measurement techniques employed
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