Making earth observation data available in the cloud is accelerating scientific discovery and enabling the creation of new products. Attend and learn how the cloud lets earth scientists, researchers, startups, and GIS professionals gather and analyze earth observation data without worrying about limitations of bandwidth, storage, memory, or processing power. Join us and learn how earth science data projects are becoming more scalable, agile, and efficient with AWS on-demand IT infrastructure.

1. © 2016, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Jed Sundwall, Global Open Data Lead
June 20, 2016
#EarthOnAWS: How the Cloud Is
Transforming Earth Observation

2. Why does AWS care about open data?
 Many of our commercial sector customers rely on quality open data as much as they
rely on our cloud infrastructure services.
 Many of our public sector customers use AWS to make their data available to a global
community of researchers, entrepreneurs, students, and fellow government agencies.
Sharing data on AWS makes it accessible to a large and growing community
of researchers, entrepreneurs, and enterprises who use the AWS Cloud.

3. Traditional data acquisition
“…data must be organized, well-documented, consistently formatted, and error free.
Cleaning the data is often the most taxing part of data science, and is frequently 80% of
the work.”
— Data Driven by DJ Patil and Hilary Mason
Tape Data center Disk Server Client
The big data challenge
Traditionally, it has been time-consuming and expensive to acquire, store, and analyze
large data sets.

4. Data acquisition in the cloud
Our solution – shared open data on AWS
When data is staged for analysis in the cloud, anyone can analyze it without needing to
download it or store it themselves.
“Ordinarily, hitting ‘copy’ on a 4 gigabyte file is an opportunity to stand up and get a fresh
cup of coffee, browse the sports section for a little while, but moving data between servers
in an Amazon data center barely affords time to touch your toes a couple times.”
— Paul Ramsey Source: http://s3.cleverelephant.ca.s3.amazonaws.com/2015-ccog.pdf

5. Landsat on AWS: usage
In the first year:
 Over 400,000 scenes available
 Over 1 billion hits globally
Used for new product development by:
Colin Reilly
Senior Director GIS
NYC Department of IT & Telecom

6. © 2016, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Christa Hasenkopf, Co-Founder of OpenAQ
June 20, 2016
The OpenAQ Community:
Fighting Air Inequality Through Open Data

7. Photo Credit: Lauren Knapp
Joe 
Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia

8. Global air inequality
1 out of 8 deaths are due
to air pollution
~90% in developing
countries (WHO, 2014)
(WHO, 2014)

9. Global air inequality

10. Photo Credit: Lauren Knapp

11. Thousands of “hidden” data sources
around the world

12. Opening up AQ empowers the public
Low-cost
sensors/
satellites
Public health policy +
research
Apps + local
activism
Media
Climate + AQ
research
Open,
transparent
data layer
Real-time
air quality
data on
public sites

13. Scaling up in the first year
• Data: PM10, PM2.5, BC, O3, CO, NO2, SO2
• ~13 million data points at 2000+ sites in 20 countries
Utilizing Amazon S3, Amazon EC2, Amazon ECS, Amazon
ElastiCache, Amazon RDS, Amazon CloudFront, Amazon
Route 53, AWS Lambda, and SSL via AGU and AWS

14. OpenAQ’s global grassroots community
• 10 core contributors on 4 continents
• ~500,000 API requests/month
• Platform accessed by ~100 research orgs
Nov. 2015: Ulaanbaatar
workshop
Upcoming in Fall 2016:
Jakarta
workshop

15. Thank you to our partners and sponsors:
• American Geophysical Union’s Thriving Earth Exchange providing
AWS credit awards
• Development Seed
• Echoing Green
• Open Science Prize: HHMI, NIH and Welcome Trust
• Internews + Earth Journalism Network
• Keen.io
• And the ENTIRE OpenAQ community!

16. © 2016, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Dr. Adam Pasch, CCM
Data Strategy and Operations Lead, Weather Science
June 20, 2016
NEXRAD Data on AWS
NOAA Big Data Project & The Climate Corporation

17. Weather is both a feature we provide, and an input to our agronomic models
http://www.climate.c
om/
The Climate Corporation (TCC) provides
decision-making tools for farmers

18. NOAA Big Data Project
Transform the Department of Commerce data capacity to
enhance the value, accessibility and usability of Commerce
data for government, business, and the public.

19. Large-scale analysis was prone to errors
Request & Wait
& Download
TCC Amazon S3 Process
Research: Analyses & Evaluations

20. Data and processing in AWS, reduces errors
Process
Research: Analyses & Evaluations
AWS NEXRAD S3

21. Everyone wins
TCC projects are several weeks shorter.
TCC evaluations of new methods happen on larger datasets.
We don’t pay Amazon for the S3 bucket to store NEXRAD data.
Instead, we pay Amazon for the EC2 instances to process the
larger dataset.
NOAA data is used more widely, but without overwhelming NCEI.
TCC/AWS found a long-standing problem in NOAA archive,
improving data quality.
2

22. © 2016, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Dr. Bruno Sánchez-Andrade Nuño
Innovation Labs World Bank Group
Open Data Use Case:
Monitoring Electrification from Space
nighlights.io

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35. Thank you!