PO.DAAC’s Transition to the Cloud: Ingest to Science User Needs

The Physical Oceanography Distributed Active Archive Center (PO.DAAC) is NASA’s data repository and archive for physical oceanographic data, including the upcoming Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite mission. SWOT will produce 20 TB of data a day, one of the largest data volumes produced by an oceanographic and hydrologic satellite mission. To improve capabilities to handle this data volume, PO.DAAC is moving to the cloud. This requires all operational functions to be migrated, such as data ingest, archive distribution, along with tools and services built on top of the data for use by the science end users. PO.DAAC has successfully completed preliminary data ingest tests between the SWOT science data systems and the archive system. Part of this success was due to the use of properly configured security mechanisms to satisfy NASA requirements. As PO.DAAC moves forward to developing a cloud based system for data archive and distribution, while also increasing data accessibility and usability (‘data as a service’), user needs become an important driver in the development of capabilities and functionalities. A user needs assessment was completed to survey and quantify what users from various research and applications communities need in order to both be able to access data and continue their research with as few hurdles as possible, and potentially adopt the cloud as a platform for Earth data use, which has the potential to enable new, bigger science. This assessment helped prioritize the development schedule of these new cloud-based tools and services. A PO.DAAC Cloud Early Adopters group was also formed, allowing them to be alpha testers of the new tools and provide critiques of their functionality. In this presentation we will provide an overview of the ingest and user needs assessment activities, their challenges and successes.