NASA’s Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite-2, ICESat-2, carries the Advanced Topographic Laser Altimeter System, ATLAS, which sends 10,000 laser pulses per second towards Earth and records individual photons reflected back to its telescope. The volume of data produced by the instrument, nearly a TB of data every day, presents a challenges for the user wishing to explore and do quick analysis on the data. Although NSIDC, the data center responsible for archiving and distributing ICESat-2 data, provides services such as browse and spatial, temporal and parameter subsetting on the data, these are not necessarily conducive to exploratory work. OpenAltimetry, a collaborative project between NSIDC and the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California, San Diego, has created an online platform that allows users to quickly view photon clouds, or waveform energy profiles in the case of ICESat/GLAS, the predecessor mission to ICESat-2/ATLAS, for any time and location of interest to the user, as well as the surface-specific elevations from the higher level ATLAS products. OpenAltimetry emphasizes ease-of-use and rapid response times. NASA’s Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite-2, ICESat-2, carries the Advanced Topographic Laser Altimeter System, ATLAS, which sends 10,000 laser pulses per second towards Earth and records individual photons reflected back to its telescope. The volume of data produced by the instrument, nearly a TB of data every day, presents a challenges for the user wishing to explore and do quick analysis on the data. Although NSIDC, the data center responsible for archiving and distributing ICESat-2 data, provides services such as browse and spatial, temporal and parameter subsetting on the data, these are not necessarily conducive to exploratory work. OpenAltimetry, a collaborative project between NSIDC, Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California San Diego, has created an online platform that allows users to quickly view photon clouds, or waveform energy profiles in the case of ICESat/GLAS, the predecessor mission to ICESat-2/ATLAS, for any time and location of interest to the user, as well as the surface-specific elevations from the higher level ATLAS products. OpenAltimetry emphasizes ease-of-use and rapid response times. A user can do more in depth data analysis on a Jupyter notebook invoked through OpenAltimetry’s map-based interface, thus providing a full data analysis stack that lives in the cloud and enables scientists to do their work without investing a lot of time thinking about dependencies and deployments.

Data is the lifeblood of the geosciences. The acquisition, processing and interpretation of data all depend on established specifications describing the systems and procedures that were used in producing, describing and distributing that data. It can be said that technical standards underpin the entire scientific endeavour. This is becoming ever truer in the era of Big Data and Open, Transdisciplinary Science. It takes the dedicated efforts of many individuals to create a viable standard. This presentation will describe the experiences and status of standards development activities related to geoscience remote sensing technologies which are being carried out under the auspices of the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society (GRSS). While the value and viability of community-developed principles and specifications have been amply demonstrated, a Standards Development Organization (SDO) exists to provide the environment, rules and governance that are needed to ensure the fair and equitable development of a standard, and to assist in the distribution and maintenance of the resulting standard. The GRSS sponsors projects with the IEEE Standards Association (IEEE-SA), which, like other SDOs such as ISO and OGC, has well-defined policies and procedures that help ensure the openness and integrity of the standards development process. Each participant in a standards working group typically brings specific interests as a producer, consumer or regulator of a product, process or service. Creating an environment that makes it possible to find consensus among competing interests is a primary role of an SDO. This presentation will include highlights and insights gained from the seven standards projects that the GRSS has initiated. These projects involve hyperspectral imagers, the spectroscopy of soils, data from synthetic aperture radars and GNSS reflectometry, calibration of microwave radiometers, and the characterization of radio frequency interference in protected geoscience bands.