NASA’s Earth Science Data Systems program wants to make sure you have everything you need
to access the petabytes of free and open Earth science data from NASA.
We want to help users, like yourself, understand
how NASA Earth science data can be used in decision making, in disaster response,
in conservation, and much more.
In the new Learn section on the Earthdata website, we provide a bunch of great resources
to help you get started with remote sensing data.
These resources include background information like the “What is Remote Sensing article”,
a resource for those new to satellite or airborne observations.
This page provides information on types of orbits, the electromagnetic spectrum,
the different kinds of sensors used, different resolutions, and information on data processing and interpretation.
Or take a look at the Essential Variables article,
this provides information on the key variables for areas of climate, ocean, biodiversity, and geodiversity
and how NASA Earth observation data can help in the assessment and monitoring of those variables.
Now that you have some background information, let’s access the data.
For users, who dont really know where to begin, check out Getting Started.
It provides information on how you can find data within Earthdata Search,
use or analyze the data following specific tutorials or data recipes,
or visualize the data within the Worldview application.
For novice data users, we have data pathfinders
These are thematic and we have agriculture and water resources,
biological diversity and ecological forecasting, health and air quality, water quality, wildfires,
and coming soon, disasters.
Data pathfinders provide direct links to commonly-used datasets across NASA’s Earth science data collections,
through commonly used tools.
These tools provide different ways of visualizing the data,
options for subsetting the data, and options for saving the data in different file formats.
The pathfinders will help you find and understand the data and tools you need.
For example, the water quality data pathfinder has information about ocean color,
benefits and limitations of using remote sensing data,
tools for access, visualization, and use, incorporating ground-based data with satellite data and so much more.
For example, the pathfinder tells me about a tool that I can use to create time-averaged maps.
With the help of the pathfinder and included webinars, I was able to acquire data for the month of interest, in this case, August of 2019.
Then, I created an average map for August over 18 years worth of data.
In my GIS tool, I was then able to take the difference between those two data products to create an anomaly map for August 2019.
There definitely were some abnormal concentrations for chlorophyll.
For more expert data users, Earthdata has toolkits
These are also thematic and we have them available for biological diversity and ecological forecasting,
freshwater availability, and wildfires.
Toolkits provide direct links to relevant datasets, whether it’s research quality data or data to be used for visualization.
The toolkits also provide links to various webinars, data recipes, and tutorials.
Lastly, if you want to understand how others are using NASA Earth science data, our feature articles,
which are organized thematically, or our data user profiles might give you some insight.
Getting Started, the pathfinders, the toolkits, and other resources help you find, access and use
NASA Earth science data which can help in your research or your organization’s decision-making process.
Come explore Earthdata.nasa.gov.
