The cloud's the limit:

Driving impact with the NASA Earth eXchange

Ariel Gold (arigold@amazon.com)

Program Manager, Open Data
Amazon Web Services

Why does Amazon

care about open data?

AWS Open Data Program Mission

Make it as easy as possible to make data open
and drive impact with it.

How do you drive impact with open data?

Build communities and tools around sustainable
open data sets.

Mission:
Reduce carbon pollution
Promote sound science to understand
and manage climate impacts

Accelerating Research : A tale of two droughts

TRMM

MODIS

Samantha et al., GRL, 2011

Xu et al., GRL, 2011

From 2005 to 2010:

Faster (24 months vs 6 months)

Consistent (same analytical methods, quality flags)
Reproducible

AWS and NASA Earth eXchange (NEX)

AWS and the NASA Earth eXchange are making

over 20 TB of NASAs Climate and Earth Science
data available to the public
NASA is providing Amazon Machine Images (AMIs)
with pre-installed software that makes it easy to
analyze and visualize this data using Amazons
complement of Big Data services
This enables crowd-sourced, citizen-science
applications like those found on the Zooniverse

The Data
NEX Downscaled Climate
Projections (NEX-DCP30)

Downscaled climate scenarios

developed for the Fifth Assessment
Report of the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC AR5)
s3://nasanex/NEX-DCP30

MODIS Vegetation Indices

Global biogeochemical and

hydrologic modeling, Agricultural
monitoring and forecasting, Landuse planning, Land cover
characterization, Land cover change
detection
s3://nasanex/NEX-DCP30

LANDSAT Global Land

Survey (GLS)

U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and

NASA produced global land data
sets from Landsat images
s3://nasanex/Landsat

The Ecosystem

How do you drive impact with open data?

Build communities and tools around sustainable open data sets.
Think Big.
Big is relative.
Get started.

Please get in touch:

arigold@amazon.com
opendata@amazon.com
Learn more about Open Data on AWS at:
http://bit.ly/awsopendata