Evolution of the technical tooling and associated communities of the ICESat-2 mission
Creators: name: Scheick, Jessica
name: Lopez Espinosa, Luis
name: Swinski, JP
name: Barrett, Andrew
name: Sutterley, Tyler
name: Snow, Tasha
name: Millstein, Joanna
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2024
Subjects: ICESat-2
NASA
icepyx
SlideRule Earth
open science

description: Abstract

The Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite 2 (ICESat-2) was launched in September 2018 and has fired almost two trillion shots over the mission lifetime. It was quickly evident early in the mission that the massive point clouds returned by the ATLAS instrument exceeded the capabilities of existing software and tooling, which made data access and usability challenging. To address these challenges, multiple open science efforts were established to help users obtain, customize, and analyze the complex data, from raw photons to gridded higher-level products. SlideRule Earth provides on-demand services that enable the user to customize the processing of raw photons into a usable product. Icepyx enables users to access all ICESat-2 data products in a simple, streamlined manner locally or in the cloud, customize certain aspects of the data (e.g. spatial and temporal subsetting; nested variables management), and then read the highly nested data from multiple granules (files) into a single data object. Earthaccess streamlines programmatic discovery, authentication, and download across all NASA datasets. Each of these technical tools excels at streamlining a different aspect of a typical research workflow and ultimately simplifies the user experience, yet currently the tools operate almost entirely independently. In contrast, the developer and user communities of these tools routinely collaborate and collectively help users navigate the complex ecosystem of tools. We will explore how these tangential communities are formally evolving and coalescing around a shared vision for the future of ICESat-2 data access and analysis tools. Our shared technological vision for tool interoperability and dependencies will be showcased, including efforts to leverage this rich ecosystem of tools for working with data from other missions and preparing for future missions and mission architectures. We aim to leverage our experience to provide a blueprint for future missions to structure and fund tool development - from mission-specific libraries to on-demand services - and ensure those tools build on the efforts of existing open-source communities.

Plain Language Abstract

A NASA satellite, ICESat-2, launched in September 2018. The sensor measures the height of objects on the Earth’s surface by reflecting green laser light off of them (ever use one of those laser measurers?). The satellite measures tens-of-thousands of heights at once. That is a lot of information to make sense of and a large file to download from NASA! Multiple groups of scientists and software developers work on making it easier to get and use these measurements. SlideRule helps people turn all those individual measurements into something more manageable (e.g. there are trees here, but not there). Icepyx makes it easier to get smaller files that only include the measurements someone is interested in, and then helps open the files on your computer. Earthaccess finds the data at NASA and makes it easy to log in to download it. However, historically each of these tools worked separately, even though their creators are friends and colleagues who work together frequently and share the goal to make it as easy as possible to find and use ICESat-2 measurements. Our presentation will share how we are working together to connect these tools and use them to work with measurements from other satellites.

More Information

Poster presentation in American Geophysical Union (AGU) 2024 Annual Meeting session IN51D: A Vision for What's Next: NASA's Evolving Data, Software, and Science