Amazon Web Services and NASA team up to provide public processing of Earth Observation data

NASA / NEX Public Data Sets on AWS

I've been talking to Amazon Web Services (AWS) lately about their public datasets program. These datasets are hosted by AWS for free to provide easy access to data and compute without having to deal with all the costs involved in some of the larger datasets. The projects I'm involved with all deal with Government (public) data sets, particularly geoscience data. Some datasets are very large. My team and I've looked at using the commercial Clouds for these purposes before but for some cases the data management issues are prohibitive. However, with AWS hosting the public data in the cloud to start with the possibilities to innovative and provide services on top of that data start to become viable again. It would also allow us to put our research infrastructure in a place readily accessible to industry early adopters.

AuScope Virtual Geophysics Laboratory
- geophysics data, tools and cloud computing for researchers

NASA and AWS have been working on this with a bunch of Landsat, MODIS and Climate data products. The key of course is to have both the data and tools available - and this means porting some of our services to the AWS way of doing things. At first glance that isn't difficult to do but is it valuable enough for someone to support the upfront work?

Aside the satellite data, I think national geophysics data and the AuScope National Virtual Core Library are good candidates and the AuScope Virtual Geophysics Laboratory provides some tools and is available to researchers on the NeCTAR research cloud. Porting this to AWS would provide industry and Government users with access. A natural complement to the National Virtual Core Library would be a Drill Hole Virtual Laboratory providing data integration, analysis, and domaining for the NVCL holes. You could even combine these and use the drill holes as constraints in geophysical inversion. Buy enough cloud compute and you might just be able to do the entire Australian continent all at once!

Exciting times ahead I'm sure.