Earth Data Rescue 2025
2016 was a different election: 2024 is so much more important
The election of a climate-change denying US president in 2016 gave rise to the potential for administrative policies that would obstruct the public’s use of government-held Earth data. Very soon after taking office, the Trump administration instructed that government websites be scrubbed of climate change mentions. These web resources were also the public-facing portals for data access. Alarmed, academic nerds at several universities began to crawl and save website information and the data they pointed at. See: Wired Magazine, February 2017.
The web data were tiny snippets of the much larger, and more important, long-term data stores kept at NASA. The task of rescuing these would be monumental. NASA holds a data record from several decades of satellite observations. These data are the backbone for planetary research into the Earth’s climate and biological systems and processes. NASA makes these data available for free. NASA Earth Science Division (ESD) controls several orbital Earth observing platforms, and stewards the data these produce. Future satellites will provide continuity for these data streams. By 2030, these data will grow to more than 200 petabytes.
In the Winter of 2017, a small group of concerned scientists and technology leaders devised a plan to make a copy of all of NASA’s Earth system data, and create an open public resource for these data in Canada.
Preparations were made, and funds secured, to rapidly download all twenty-plus petabytes of NASA Earth satellite data from its data centers (DAACs), using fast data pipes to nearby universities, and racks of high-capacity drives. These would be trucked north. Even though large portions of NASA data are routinely offloaded for research projects at various universities, it was decided that copying the entire data corpus would be the safest solution for complete data rescue. A destination in Toronto was secured.
Through private conversations with DAAC managers, it was determined that no immediate action would be required to rescue data from the NASA DAACs. The managers were certain that they could administratively delay any orders that would limit access or threaten the long term storage of data for long enough to accomplish data rescue. They also mostly doubted that either the top-level civil servants or the political appointees to NASA would threaten such an important national resource. They did, of course, worry about annual budget priorities and future satellite missions.
2025 might signal the end of US Earth data availability
Earth data rescue this time around is both more urgent and less possible than in 2016.
This time, the amount of data is now more than a hundred petabytes.
This time, Project 2025 promises to replace thousands of civil servants, probably including DAAC managers, with political appointees.
This time, there is talk of firing NOAA and NASA scientists, and getting rid of the National Weather Service.
