Data Announcement

Announcing the next NASA Earthdata Webinar on April 23, 2025

The next NASA ESDIS data training webinar, “Accelerating Scientific Discovery through Exploratory and Open Data Access via OPeNDAP in the Cloud” will be held on Wednesday, April 23, 2025, at 2 PM EDT (-04:00 UTC).

          

Webinar POC: Jennifer Brennan, NASA Earthdata Webinar Host, Task Lead, NASA ESDIS User and Mission Support Office (EUMSO)

Email: Jennifer.L.Brennan@nasa.gov                     

 

For more information and to register: https://go.nasa.gov/4lzG8C0

Description: In this webinar, we will introduce the Open-source Project for a Network Data Access Protocol (OPeNDAP ) and showcase recent advancements that enable performant, cloud-optimized access to NASA’s archival and hierarchical scientific datasets—specifically those in HDF5, HDF4, and HDF4-EOS2 formats. We will demonstrate how OPeNDAP supports efficient data access in the cloud through the use of DMR++ sidecar files, which provide metadata to enable selective and scalable access to data.

During this event our speakers will feature reproducible, interactive, and science-focused use case examples that highlight two complementary approaches for accessing NASA Earth data in the cloud:

  • Subsetting and retrieving data via OPeNDAP's Hyrax data server.
  • Direct cloud access using DMR++ sidecar files for efficient S3-based workflows.

Through these examples, we aim to show how OPeNDAP in the cloud can empower exploratory scientific analysis and accelerate discovery using open NASA datasets.

Presenters

James Gallagher, President of OPeNDAP and Senior Software Engineer.

James is one of the principal architects of the Data Access Protocol (DAP) protocol, a widely adopted framework that enables remote access to complex scientific datasets across heterogeneous systems. James has led the development of scalable data services for distributed storage systems, including integrations with cloud platforms like AWS S3, and continues to work supporting agencies such as NASA towards delivering FAIR-aligned (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) data solutions. His work bridges low-level systems development with high-level scientific data workflows, enabling researchers to access and analyze data more efficiently.

 

Speaker: Miguel A. Jimenez-Urias, PhD., Computational Oceanographer,  Science Community Director of OPeNDAP

An oceanographer and applied mathematician by training, Miguel was previously an Assistant Research Scientist at Johns Hopkins University, where his research focused on multi-scale oceanic tracer mixing, was a member of the Poseidon Project–an exascale community ocean modeling effort–and a lead developer of OceanSpy for enabling scientific analysis on CubedSphere, oceanic model output. At OPeNDAP Miguel leads a science-driven, software development of PyDAP, a python DAP implementation and Xarray engine, and collaborates with the broader geospatial community to enable cloud-performant, reproducible, and open data-driven scientific discovery.

 

To register:

https://www.earthdata.nasa.gov/learn/webinars/accelerating-scientific-discovery-through-exploratory-open-data-access-via-opendap