A Multi-Agency Collaboration for Climate Data

Last week at the United Nations Climate Conference (COP28), the U.S. government announced the US Greenhouse Gas Center, a multi-agency effort, to ease access to well-curated, reliable information and data on greenhouse gas emissions and their impact on climate. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is leading the implementation of the center, joined by the Environment Protection Agency (EPA), National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) who each bring data and expertise.

We worked closely with NASA IMPACT to lead the development of the open source technology for this modern data and information platform.

Refining Our Tools for Open Science on Earth Data

The new cloud-based data and information platform at earth.gov/ghgcenter leads the way in implementing core principles of open information and open science.

For the last few years, we've been working with NASA IMPACT to develop the Visualization, Exploration, and Data Analysis (VEDA) platform software. VEDA's goal is to enable open science with a set of reusable tools that allow researchers, stakeholders, and citizen scientists to access Earth data in the cloud.

By accessing this data in the cloud, users can interact with the data, discover useful insights, and operate powerful cloud computing environments, all without the need of big computers or bandwidth. The flexibility and reusability built into VEDA's tools allow us to develop new platforms in a fraction of the time. All of this is totally open source, for advancing open science across as many projects as possible.

Open Source Software Leads to Faster Development

In a multi-disciplinary team between scientists and program coordinators at NASA and partners at 2i2c, we were able to develop an entire geospatial information platform in the span of four months.

The U.S. GHG Center data and information services are an implementation of the VEDA platform and made up of three parts:

1. An engaging Dashboard as the first entry point for those wanting to learn more about the U.S. GHG Center and all the work that the U.S. government is doing to monitor emissions. The dashboard also lets you discover and interact with the climate datasets and find out how to load the data into other tools.
2. A set of Data Services that makes the Analysis-Ready, Cloud-Optimized (ARCO) datasets easy to access through community-standard interfaces like Spatio Temporal Asset Catalog (STAC) and data visualization APIs
3. A flexible Analytics Hub to enable scientists to work with the published GHG data in a dedicated JupyterHub environment, hosted by 2i2c and optimized for fast and easy access to the data

VEDA’s flexible and reusable tools allowed for a prototype to be developed quickly. This was especially important as the U.S. GHG center attempted to coordinate content and development across its four partner federal agencies. As the pressure and complexity of this project grew, the ability to rapidly prototype and iterate on the product enabled a successful launch.

What's next

Our experience with building the US Greenhouse Gas Center has made it clear that a need exists to showcase geospatial data with the full flexibility of custom solutions, and the speed that off-the-shelf solutions provide.

There is still more work to do. As VEDA’s set of open-source tools are used across more projects, they will improve both in form and function. Supporting the U.S. GHG Center was a wonderful way to test VEDA’s ability to satisfy this need.

You can explore the U.S. GHG Center Dashboard for yourself.

More information on the set of tools that made this possible, can be found in VEDA’s open-source repositories or reach out for a conversation.