Podcast Overview

Guests: Stefanie Kagone, contract remote sensing scientist, USGS EROS Center; Aaron Friesz, contract science coordination lead for NASA Land Processes Distributed Active Archive Center (LP DAAC).

Host: John Hult

Producer: John Hult

Release date: Sept. 7, 2021

Summary: Satellite imagery is everywhere. We see it on TV news and weather coverage, in our Twitter and Facebook feeds, and on our phones’ mapping apps. The data behind that imagery is nothing like a screenshot, though. It’s comprised of tiny packets of data, broken down from huge files and digitally manipulated to resemble the surface of the Earth, a swirling storm system or a map of urban growth. Cloud computing resources can make it easier to work with huge datasets that cover long periods of time, which is why many remote sensing scientists are using it for their analyses. On this episode of Eyes on Earth, we hear from a scientist who used the cloud for a 150-year water use modeling project, and from a data scientist working to help train others to use cloud resources.

More on satellites and cloud computing:

• USGS Early Warning – Operational Simplified Surface Energy Balance (SSEBop) Evapotranspiration
• NASA Land Processes Distributed Active Archive Center
• NASA Earth Data – Python tutorial
• Jupyter notebook – LP DAAC
• LP DAAC Cloud Data Tutorial
• Announcing the NASA Openscapes Framework