1. Access and use of NASA and other federal Earth science data Ethan McMahon ESIP Summer Meeting July 8, 2014

2. Today’s session From the data user perspective Introduction Panelists describe experiences of data users Discussion 2

3. The Problem There are many audiences of Earth science data (aka data users) – Researchers – Interested public – Software developers These users want data for different purposes They want more and more data What are their experiences and how can data providers help? 3

4. New data users Interested public (communities, non-profits) – Perform their own analyses – Gather and interpret data (citizen science) Software developers – Create green apps – Have the desire but not the context 4

5. Experience with developers Developers try to find the data but many cannot – Some ask about the data and get answers from experts – Others try to use the data but are not successful No experts Poor documentation Unusable formats How can we help them do good? 5

6. Examples of federal Earth science data Global Change Master Directory Giovanni Earth Explorer National Climatic Data Center Environmental Dataset Gateway Data.gov 6

7. Big Earth Data Initiative Seek agreement on common approaches for – Discoverability via catalog services and search engines – Accessibility via online data services – Usability via standard formats, metadata, vocabularies 7

8. Today’s panelists Tamara Ledley of TERC Janet Fredericks of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Margaret Mooney of the UW-Madison Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies Rob Carver of The Weather Channel 8

9. Discussion What are your experiences in accessing and using these data? What are the patterns of these new data users? How can we help users use the data appropriately? What else can data providers do to help? 9

10. Contacts Tamara Ledley – tamara_ledley@terc.edu Janet Fredericks – jfredericks@whoi.edu Margaret Mooney – margaret.mooney@ssec.wisc.edu Rob Carver – rob.carver@weather.com Ethan McMahon – ethan.m.mcmahon@nasa.gov 10