Mentors

A cross-DAAC mentor community creating & teaching resources to help researchers migrate workflows to the cloud

This cross-DAAC mentor community is creating & teaching resources to help researchers migrate workflows to the cloud. We meet and learn together, working with alignment on common needs for researchers using NASA Earthdata. Mentors receive Carpentries Instructor training and Openscapes mentorship to help you refine teaching strategies for Cloud, while collaborating on cloud tutorials to reuse rather than reinventing separately. Mentors teach and support in opportunities of different types: Hackathons, Workshops, and the Openscapes Champions program. We expect a range of technical ability and teaching experience. Through these growth opportunities within a broader community engagement approach, Mentors will also gain visibility for their work as well as for their DAACs. The expected time commitment is 3 days/month per year (and this ebbs and flows with your deadlines). We have 1.5 hour Mentor Calls (planning) every 2 weeks and Coworking calls (screensharing and doing) and asynchronous work in between. The majority of your time will be spent self-directed towards improving support approaches for specific DAACs, and you’ll be collaborating with others at your DAAC as well as across DAACs and the broader open science community.

Please also see how we onboard documentation – this is part of the Earthdata Cloud Cookbook that is the main place for all cloud resources the Mentors are developing.

Current Activities

2024 goals

NASA Openscapes is the main access point for NASA Earth science & tutorial development on the Cloud. Openscapes is not extra work, it’s the how of doing the work aligned with DAAC goals to enable users/science. Building from successes and momentum 2021-2023, in 2024 we will continue teaching staff & researchers, helping us all grow as open science leaders & aligned with DAAC activities. This is vital to the shift to Earthdata Cloud and to NASA’s values for open science and equity.

  • Provide stability for and strengthen the DAAC Mentor community as we develop and teach a common set of tutorials and coordinate and lead learning events, in part through our twice monthly Openscapes Cohort Calls.
  • Reuse and refine shared teaching resources, share stories and lessons learned at conferences and meetups
  • Lead events together (workshops and Champions cohort) with research teams, with Mentors assisting to support researchers and learn new modalities of support
  • Support transition for NASA Earthdata users to the Cloud via continued effort to maintain development for cloud infrastructure & earthaccess Python library, Earthdata Cloud Cookbook & Cheatsheets, give talks, tie-in better with NASA Earthdata website, and cross-learning with NOAA and other Openscapes Mentors & Open science community. Additionally:
    • Support transition for post-workshop researchers to do their science longer-term (“fledging”)
    • Scoping 3 years ahead - understand how people use Hub & Cloud - what it costs, metrics. Quantifying open science outcomes - report back our successes

2024 focus

  • earthaccess
  • Cloud infrastructure
  • Cookbook
  • Workshop planning

Our schedule

Mentor Calls, Coworking, and Hackdays

We have twice-monthly Mentor Calls, which are planning and learning sessions that currently are semi-structured. We kickoff those calls with about 10 mins of check in and agenda design and then we will move to proposed topics, including professional development skills like coaching. In alternating weeks, we have Coworking sessions to work on shared goals together, screensharing and often working in the 2i2c JupyterHub and in GitHub. Hackdays are additional times set to advance our four specific focus areas above.

Calendar

Coworking sessions & hackdays are open to anyone to join; see our MainPlanning GitHub Project.

  1. Winter & Spring - We have twice-monthly Mentor Calls and Coworking sessions in alternating weeks. February-May focused extended Hackday sessions with focus listed above.

  2. Spring Champions Cohort - We will support 7-10 research teams to learn, discuss, and plan what transitioning their workflows with NASA Earthdata could look like in the Cloud.

  3. Summer and ESIP meeting - In July and August we planned to take a break from our biweekly calls to let this group rest. However, there was interest to keep the momentum and ability to collaborate with anyone available, so we have continued to host biweekly calls and move forward with AGU workshop proposals, and have guest speakers. In July many Mentors met in person at the ESIP Summer Conference in Vermont, including for a one-day retreat-workshop to shape sustainability plans for the group.

  4. Fall - We onboard new mentors; we will have our first Mentor Call with the full group of mentors - to introduce everyone and orient around the NASA Openscapes project. Our initial call will include sharing plans, UWGs and other events on the calendar and continuing onboarding new DAAC mentors. In preparing for AGU workshops in December, returning DAAC mentors will lead teaching dry runs with the cloud tutorials as a way to onboard the group to data access in the cloud and to get your fresh perspective on our existing material. (What works? What’s confusing?).

Mentors Retreat 2024

We are excited to be hosting a NASA Openscapes Mentors Retreat Oct 16-17 2024 (remotely, online). Please share this email with your DAAC Managers. This retreat will bring together user support staff from across the DAACs that have engaged as leaders through NASA Openscapes and are helping users migrate workflows using NASA Earthdata to the cloud. It is also a way to onboard new user support staff as mentors. NASA Openscapes is not meant to be extra time, but time where people do their existing work in a different way – with open source science workflows to tackle common things together. We have seen the biggest momentum when there are 2-3 mentors at each DAAC, so that pairs/trios can work together within their DAAC as they bring back what they learn from cross-DAAC work. NASA Openscapes Lead Julie Lowndes is happy to email/meet with mentors and managers for any questions. Thank you to DAAC Managers and ESDIS for supporting staff in this way, it makes a real impact – more momentum & background below. This remote retreat will be co-designed & led with Liz Neeley of Liminal, a hero-expert in science communication and sensemaking and who has been getting to know you and your work over the past months.

Retreat Details - Oct 16-17 2024, 10am-2pm PT each day (remotely, online). We see the main value of this retreat as a chance to reconnect and ​​reinvigorate our cross-DAAC community going into fall. We will hear from many voices to share progress and barriers to support users, and onboard more of our growing community as contributors as we refine our shared vision for momentum forward. We will follow up with report-out summaries and ways to contribute for mentors not able to join.

Momentum - NASA Openscapes Mentors have created “go-to” resources for staff and users across DAACs – such as the earthaccess python library and tutorials in the Earthdata Cloud Cookbook. Over the last 3.5 years, mentors have developed a supportive community and created these resources in response to teaching hundreds of DAAC users via workshops and events together, and then further iterated through active use, documentation, and teaching. Recent presentations showcasing this work is Supporting NASA Earthdata users in the Cloud: NASA Openscapes onboarding & fledging and earthaccess: how to accelerate user value through open, collaborative development; all work is developed openly and linked from https://nasa-openscapes.github.io. 

Background - Openscapes is an open source approach and a movement. It is a way to work together that shifts culture by helping people find each other and collaboratively evolve their work with modern and kind open data science workflows. Openscapes launched in 2018 through funding from Mozilla, via an open science fellowship awarded to Julia Lowndes. Openscapes grew with funding from NASA Earthdata, via decades-long community building leadership by Erin Robinson. In addition to our flagship Champions program that helps science teams shift workflows to open science, we lead multi-year projects with NASA and NOAA. Our NASA work supports scientific researchers using data from NASA Distributed Active Archive Centers (DAACs) as they migrate workflows to the cloud; our NOAA work is part of the Biden-Harris Administration’s Inflation Reduction Act funds to support NOAA Fisheries’ data, infrastructure, and workforce modernization.

Ongoing and Previous Activities

2023 goals

  • Strengthen the DAAC Mentor community as they develop and teach a common set of tutorials and coordinate and lead learning events, in part through our twice monthly Openscapes Cohort Calls.
  • Reuse and refine shared teaching resources, share stories and lessons learned at conferences and meetups
  • Lead events together (a hackathon and Champions cohort) with research teams, with Mentors assisting to support researchers and learn new modalities of support
  • Identify a plan for sustainability, including the technical and social infrastructure needed. Shift to a more of a community structure from a cohort structure

Calendar 2023

Mentor Calls (Planning) and Coworking Calls (screensharing and doing)

Date Mentor Call Topics Coworking Call Topics
Aug 3 NOAA Fisheries - NASA Mentors exchange
Aug 9 AGU Workshop abstracts refinement
Aug 17 Coiled.io collaboration kickoff with Champions teams
Aug 23 Aimee Barciauskas will present the initial cloud optimized data guide for feedback and determine next steps for sharing science tutorials from VEDA and MAAP
Aug 31 R Cloud Hackdays kickoff; Carl Boettiger
Sept 6 Cedric Wannaz, MathWorks to demo Matlab in 2i2c and analysis-in-place workflow (direct access/reading the data). Previous demo: https://youtube.com/watch?v=JrIp-LFpPAI
Sept 14 JupyterBook and JupyterHubs via CI - discourse
Sept 20 Fall Kickoff & new mentors onboarding
Sept 28
Oct 4 AGU workshop planning overview (GitHub repo): goals, topics, people. Hyperwall. AGU mtg Dec 11-15.
Oct 12
Oct 18 AGU (30 mins)
Oct 26
Nov 1 AGU (30 mins)
Nov 9
Nov 15 AGU dry runs with helpers
Nov 23 US Thanksgiving. No Coworking
Nov 29 AGU dry runs with helpers

Coiled

This Fall we will also be working with Coiled.io, with the goal to support Mentors’ and Champions’ Cloud workflows on their own laptops as a viable pathway forward when they leave our JupyterHub, and for us all to learn more about what this looks like and how to parallelize computation in the cloud. To sign up for Coiled, please fill out this Google Form.

R Cloud Hackdays

This Fall during our coworking calls we’ll focus one breakout room on R tutorial development for the Cookbook. We’ll be joined by Carl Boettiger (Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management and Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center for Data Science & Environment at UC Berkeley, co-founder of rOpenSci)!

2022 goals:

  • Strengthen the DAAC Mentor community of practice as they develop and teach a common set of tutorials and coordinate and lead learning events, in part through our twice monthly Openscapes Cohort Calls
  • Reuse and refine shared teaching resources, share stories and lessons learned at conferences and meetups
  • Lead events together (a hackathon and Champions cohort) with research teams, with Mentors assisting to support researchers and learn new modalities of support

Our schedule:

  1. Mentor kick-off 1:1’s! We’d like to meet with each DAAC mentor team to get to know you and discuss the specific needs of your DAAC and the research teams you support. Please coordinate with the others from your DAAC and book a 30-minute intro meeting the week of June 17 (or June 24 as a back-up). 

  2. June 30 Mentor Cohort Call We will have our first call with the full group of mentors on June 30 - to introduce everyone and orient around the NASA Openscapes project.

  3. Summer Break - From the beginning of July through mid-August we are going to take a break from our biweekly calls to let this group rest. We hope that during this break each DAAC will do a bit of light planning for what they hope to accomplish in the next year to share at our first call when we return at the end of August.

  4. Back to our DAAC Mentor schedule: We will pick back up on regular meetings on August 25 (or that week) with our biweekly meetings. Our initial call will include sharing plans, UWGs and other events on the calendar and continuing the orientation for new DAAC mentors. Returning DAAC mentors will walk through the initial cloud tutorials as a way to onboard the group to data access in the cloud and to get your fresh perspective on our existing material. (What works? What’s confusing?)

2021 goals:

  • Build a DAAC community of practice through our twice monthly Openscapes Cohort Calls, a Carpentries Intro Python/Git Workshop, and Carpentries Instructor Training
  • Develop participating teams as Mentors and help them practice teaching in a style to prepare them for a workshop at the American Geophysical Union Conference (AGU) (Dec) and the Openscapes Champions cohort with research teams (early 2022)
  • Support Mentors towards establishing a common set of tutorials that they can then build off their DAAC-specific and science examples


2022 NASA Champions Cohort

Please see the Champions page!

2021 Cloud Hackathon

The Cloud Hackathon: Transitioning Earthdata Workflows to the Cloud is a virtual 5-day (4 hours per day) collaborative open science learning experience aimed at exploring, creating, and promoting effective cloud-based science and applications workflows using NASA Earthdata Cloud data, tools, and services (among others), in support of Earth science data processing and analysis in the era of big data. All details and tutorials are available at: https://nasa-openscapes.github.io/2021-Cloud-Hackathon/.

Mentor Community

The NASA Openscapes Mentors community is growing! Mentors from five DAACs who have continued from 2021 are noted with an * below. We are excited to see the DAAC mentor community expand with ORNL and ASF Mentors joining us in 2022 and SEDAC and OBDAAC Mentors joining in 2023 for representation from nine DAACs all together. Welcome!

Andy Barrett*

National Snow & Ice Data Center (NSIDC)

Chris Battisto

Chris is a Scientific Developer working at the Goddard Earth Sciences Data Information Services Center (GES DISC). He focuses on creating documentation and guides relating to a wide array of GES DISC user support needs, including cloud data access methods and help desk queries. Chris has a background in meteorology, and received a master’s degree in geography from Northern Illinois University in 2021. 

Brandon Bottomley

Alaska Satellite Facility (ASF)

Ian Carroll

Dr. Carroll is an Associate Research Scientist at the University of Maryland Baltimore County working at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center on phytoplankton community ecology and data science. Phytoplankton are a diverse collection of photosynthetic organisms, found in all water bodies, that range in size from less-than a micron to millimeters in length. Despite their small size, their presence in the photic zone can be detected from space due to their light-absorbing pigments. Dr. Carroll investigates machine learning approaches to predicting the community composition (abundances of each type) of phytoplankton using data from ocean color instruments. He also supports science data production for NASA’s PACE mission. ### Matt Fisher

National Snow & Ice Data Center (NSIDC)

Aaron Friesz*

Aaron Friesz is the Science Coordination Lead at NASA’s Land Processes Distributed Active Archive Center (LP DAAC). In his role, Aaron provides user needs insights and technical support for archive and distribution, service development, and outreach activities. He develops tutorials, scripts, and presentations that highlight the use of land remote sensing data in analysis workflows. More recently, his work has focused on advocating for the uptake of cloud computing in the land remote sensing community.

Alexis Hunzinger*

Alexis Hunzinger is a Support Scientist at the NASA Goddard Earth Sciences Data and Information Services Center (GES DISC), focused on addressing the needs of the user community. Alexis works closely with the GES DISC User Working Group, fielding concerns and suggestions to be implemented at the DAAC. She also leads the effort at GES DISC of developing guides, tutorials, and other resources designed to educate and welcome users to the Earthdata Cloud.

Mahsa Jami

Land Processes DAAC (LPDAAC)

Daniel Kaufman

Danny Kaufman is a Lead Data Scientist for the Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring of POllution (TEMPO) instrument at the NASA Atmospheric Science Data Center (ASDC). In this role, Danny helps lead the development and coordination of data processing tools and services for new air quality observations from TEMPO. He is excited to join the Openscapes community, and he is looking forward to learning together and working towards improved cloud-based data analysis workflows. Danny’s research expertise is in numerical modeling, optimization, and analysis of ocean biogeochemistry and climate data.

Alexander Lewandowski

Alaska Satellite Facility (ASF)

Bri Lind

Bri is a Geospatial Data Scientist at NASA’s Land Processes Distributed Active Archive Center (LP DAAC).  Bri is formally trained as an ecologist and remote sensing scientist and is deeply interested in facilitating the fusion of diverse remote sensing products with field data to enhance scientific insight. As a visual learner and science-oriented coder, Bri is focused on making materials that are easy to understand and likes to convert challenging concepts into flexible and easy-to-apply approaches.

Luis Lopez*

Luis Lopez is a Research Software Engineer at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colorado. He has helped develop tools and services to facilitate data access and discoverability across different NASA Earth missions. He is a passionate advocate of open science and has contributed to open source projects such as Apache Nutch, PyLDAVis and others. He’s always happy to help scientists find ways to make their workflows more efficient. Luis has presented his work at SciPy LATAM, PyData Global and the IEEE annual Big Data symposium.

Catalina Oaida Taglialatela*

Catalina M. OaidaTaglialatela, PhD is an Applied Science System Engineer at NASA’s JPL (and PO.DAAC), combining hydrology and Earth science domain expertise (science researcher by training) with a system engineering perspective. Focus on broadening the user base for NASA Earth observations and remote sensing data in the Cloud, and helping increase discoverability, accessibility and usability of these data for the science research and applications communities, and enabling shorter “time to science”. Reducing those barriers to science when data and services are in the cloud, while recognizing that there is a great diversity in user needs, experiences, domain expertise, access to resources - create and implement a comprehensive plan to ensure as many of these user ‘types’ are supported. Develop science use cases as training examples, leveraging open data and open science (and tools). Learning from others and co-creating.

Celia Ou

Physical Oceanography DAAC (PO.DAAC)

Kytt MacManus

Socioeconomic Data and Application Data Center (SEDAC)

Juan Martinez

Socioeconomic Data and Application Data Center (SEDAC)

Victoria McDonald

As a Data Engineer at the Physical Oceanography Distributed Active Archive Center (PO.DAAC) at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Victoria spends a lot of time thinking about scientific data: how we manage it, how we make it accessible, how we reduce the steep learning curves that can hinder scientific discovery. Building better, open, collaborative, software so that we can make complex data analysis more accessible is something she is passionate about.

Jack McNelis*

Jack McNelis is a Science Applications Software Engineer at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (and the PO.DAAC) with experience leveraging EOS data for rangeland ecosystem monitoring applications. He develops and curates metadata to describe PO.DAAC data holdings, and to better integrate them with data delivery services and end user softwares. He also develops resources for users to be better prepared to implement their analyses in the cloud.

Cassie Nickles

Dr. Nickles is an Applied Science Systems Engineer Postdoc working with the Physical Oceanography Data Active Archive Center (PO.DAAC) at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). As an applied science researcher herself, Cassie focuses on the end-user experience working with cloud-based datasets. She writes coding tutorials in Jupyter Notebooks to help facilitate data ease of access and provide science application examples. She actively seeks ways to curate cloud data and information so that end-users from a variety of backgrounds can understand and discover their optimal cloud workflows. Cassie has research expertise in hydrologic remote sensing and graduated with a PhD in Civil Engineering from Northeastern University in 2021.

Brianna Pagán

Brianna is the Lead Development Engineer at NASA’s Goddard Earth Sciences (GES) Data and Information Services Center (DISC). In her role, Brianna guides the transition of on premise services to an entirely cloud-based infrastructure across various engineering teams. Her previous experience involves leading the research and development of remote-sensing based products, working alongside teams of geospatial scientists and developers to get services in production environments. Brianna’s research expertise is in remote sensing and eco-hydrology. 

Rupesh Shrestha

Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL)

Sargent Shriver

Alaska Satellite Facility (ASF)

Geoffrey Stano

Global Hydrometeorology Resource Center (GHRC)

Amy Steiker*

Amy Steiker is the NSIDC DAAC Data Services Engineer, specializing in the development and management of data education resources, tools, and services for NSIDC DAAC’s growing user community, as well as data transformation service development for NASA EOSDIS. She is excited to join this first Openscapes cohort to work together with our science communities to develop and sustain tooling that supports their data processing workflows as they transition to the Earthdata Cloud.

Lucas Sterzinger

Goddard Earth Sciences Data and Information Services Center (GES DISC)

Nikki Tebaldi

Nikki Tebaldi is a Cloud Adoption Engineer for the Physical Oceanographic Distributed Active Archive Center (PO.DAAC). Nikki has led the migration of an on-premise workflow to the cloud which produces GHRSST Level 2P Sea Surface Temperature datasets and continues to work to improve the workflow architecture in the cloud. Her past and current work also includes integrating cloud-based data endpoints into a workflow that produces GHRSST Level 4 MUR Sea Surface Temperature datasets and architecting a cloud workflow that produces river discharge parameter estimates from SWOT data. Nikki is interested in collaborating on and developing strategies for migrating scientific workflows to the cloud.

Michele Thornton

Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL)

Makhan Virdi*

Makhan Virdi is the ASDC DAAC Scientist, experienced in creating geospatial tools and services for science-based analysis, visualization (UI/UX), discovery and distribution of data generated by field/laboratory observations, remote sensing, and model simulation. He is interested in AI/ML for earth science data, multi-sensor data fusion, and data analytics in the cloud. He is excited to be part of the Openscapes community, and is looking forward to learning from peers, and sharing his knowledge and skills with the community to develop and promote data science techniques, best practices, and inter-agency collaborations.

Guoqing Wang

Guoqing Wang is the DAAC scientist for the Ocean Biology Distributed Active Archive Center (OB.DAAC). In her role, Guoqing leads the operation of user working group and acts as a bridge between users and data providers. She holds a PhD in Environmental Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Boston with a focus on ocean color remote sensing. She is experienced in ocean optics data collection, data processing and analysis, satellite validation, and algorithm development. She is looking forward to working with Openscape to leverage her existing knowledge to the cloud era.

Jess Welch

Since September 2018, Dr. Jessica Nicole Welch has held a position at the ORNL DAAC, which specializes in data archive for terrestrial biogeochemistry, ecology, and environmental processes. Her work focuses on dataset curation, project coordination, and science communication. Jess holds a PhD in Conservation Biology from the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Tennessee. When she’s not working at ORNL or participating in community service, she plays Ultimate with her friends.

Past Participants

Jennifer Adams

Goddard Earth Sciences Data and Information Services Center (GES DISC)

Vishal Bagadia

Vishal Bagadia is a data science analyst working on contract at the Atmospheric Science Data Center DAAC, NASA Langley Research Center. His experience in exploring emissions retrievals from satellite missions and guiding science teams during the development of their research products powers his work on addressing data interoperability concerns and being responsive to user’s engagement with the archived data. He is energized in leveraging emerging, free, and open-source technologies to better represent and visualize large datasets, building web applications to meet user’s data transformation and accessibility needs, and ultimately producing sustainable solutions to meet end-user requirements as data moves into the cloud.

Shubhankar Gahlot

Interagency Implementation and Advanced Concepts Team (IMPACT)

Iksha Gurung

Interagency Implementation and Advanced Concepts Team (IMPACT)

Cole Krehbiel

Cole Krehbiel is a remote sensing data scientist working as a contractor to NASA’s Land Processes Distributed Active Archive Center (LP DAAC). He is interested in improving access to geospatial data for diverse user communities. Cole supports missions archived and distributed by the LP DAAC including MODIS, VIIRS, ASTER, ECOSTRESS, and GEDI by creating Python tutorials and data prep scripts and providing workshops and webinars to facilitate community uptake and understanding of those missions.

Paul Moth

Paul Moth is a Data Support Specialist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center Distributed Active Archive Center (NSIDC DAAC). He is part of the User Services team and currently represents MODIS, VIIRS, SMAP, High Mountain Asia, and Nimbus missions at NSIDC DAAC. He is interested in working with early adopters and science team members and gathering feedback that identifies the key operations/steps/workflows that would be most important for creating tutorials and educational materials.

Muthukumaran Ramasubramanian

Interagency Implementation and Advanced Concepts Team (IMPACT)

Christine Smit

Global Hydrometeorology Resource Center (GHRC)

Matt Tisdale

Matt Tisdale is a data scientist working at the NASA Atmospheric Science Data Center (ASDC). He is interested in improving access to ASDC satellite and airborne data products. He uses ArcGIS, OPeNDAP, Python, and Jupyter notebooks to show users how to obtain and analyze data from ASDC. I am interested in learning more cloud analysis techniques to share with our user base as more and more of our ASDC data products are migrated to the cloud.