The EarthScope-operated data systems of the NSF National Geophysical Facility are migrating to cloud services. To learn more about this effort and find resources, visit earthscope.org/data/cloud

While our cloud data system migration and community support effort has been a very large undertaking, we haven’t had to work in a vacuum. A number of other science organizations and communities have engaged in similar projects. Some are currently working on the same challenges and can compare notes, and some others are far enough along to illuminate the path in helpful ways.

One example of this is NASA’s MAAP and VEDA projects, which are facilitating direct access to huge datasets stored on the commercial cloud. MAAP was created for work with above-ground biomass data, and VEDA is extending this model into a platform that can be used for multiple types of Earth science data. Like us, these projects have partnered with 2i2c to build notebook hubs to help researchers explore and process data with cloud resources adjacent to the data archives.

EarthScope staff have benefited from learning about efforts like this, but our community might also be interested in seeing how other researchers are putting new cloud platforms to use. To that end, we talked with Development Seed’s Aimee Barciauskas about what the MAAP and VEDA projects are offering researchers in their space. You can listen to that conversation in the video below.