A New Cloud Native Visualization Tool for Earth Science Data at the GHRC DAAC

The Global Hydrology Resource Center (GHRC) Distributed Active Archive Center (DAAC), a joint venture between the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) and NASA, has developed a framework for using cloud-native technologies for ingesting, cataloging, subsetting, downloading, and visualizing NASA Earth Science multi-instrument datasets. This framework uses many serverless technologies from the Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform to keep the cost of managing such cloud-based services very low. This framework is being successfully used for GHRC's Field Campaign Explorer (FCX), which is in the midst of being ported to AWS. Originally developed for the HS3 field campaign, FCX’s capabilities are being extended, both in function and by using AWS, to serve as the primary end user tool to visualize data holdings at GHRC. FCX incorporates design features and expertise developed by GHRC members in the creation of the Visualization for Integrated Satellite, Airborne, and Ground-based data Exploration (VISAGE). Combined, these efforts are aimed at creating a tool that can be used to discover, visualize, and obtain field campaign and other data. This allows for the re-enactment of mission flights, interactive visualizations, three-dimensional displays, and subset and view plots of data on the fly. This presentation will discuss the general framework’s architecture as well as provide use case examples for demonstration. This framework will serve as an example of how to do end-to-end cloud-native services for Earthdata Cloud. This poster was presented in January 2020 at the Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP) Winter Meeting held in Bethesda, MD.