—Katie Baynes, NASA Earth Data Officer
As our data archive volume surpassed 123 petabytes at the end of 2024, we continue to research the best way to sustain support for and open access to one of the largest archives of Earth science data in the world—driving innovation and improving lives.
Earth science data showed up in many incredible ways over the last year.
The Fire Information Resource Management System (FIRMS) continued to aid communities across the globe by providing near real-time Earth observation data. The FIRMS dashboard offers people on the ground information on location, extent, and intensity of active fires and hotspots, often within minutes of satellite detection. In July 2024, the application was the most visited site for multiple days during the California wildfires. Indji Watch also used FIRMS to keep energy companies aware of wildfires located near energy assets. Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, FIRMS assisted Thai officials in detecting smoke and haze and aided in improvements for fire detection in the Amazon.
The MSI instrument aboard ESA's Sentinel-2A platform captured the aftermath of the Palisades and Eaton Fires on January 12, 2025.
A new GEDI product from NASA’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory Distributed Active Archive Center (ORNL DAAC), the Level 4C Footprint Level Waveform Structural Complexity Index (WSCI) Version 2 dataset, provided the first near-global estimate of forest canopy structural complexity and its uncertainties, offering insights into its variation across different ecological regimes.
This graphic is a subset of the Waveform Structural Complexity Index (WSCI) predictions from the GEDI Level 4C footprint product over the Eastern Amazon. Brighter colors indicate greater structural complexity; darker colors indicate lower complexity. Credit: NASA's ORNL DAAC.
During the devastating blackouts in Houston where millions lost power from Hurricane Beryl, Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) nighttime imagery in Worldview helped reporters in Houston spread awareness of the dire nature of the situation. Black Marble imagery was also used to show the impacts of Hurricane Helene on Georgia in September 2024.
Arctic explorers sailing through the Northwest Passage used NASA Worldview to help them navigate sea ice conditions.
This is a snapshot showing the Northwest Passage in August 2024 (the same month as the voyage) using Terra/ MODIS true color corrected reflectance data. Credit: NASA Worldview
In the Aleutian Islands, researchers used synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data to monitor distant and remote volcanoes that, when erupting, impede visibility for planes flying in the area. With satellite data, the volcanoes can be watched from afar and reported on to pilots flying overhead to avoid a dangerous situation.
A view of Okmok caldera looking east. Okmok sits at the western edge of the Aleutian Islands Arc. Credit: David Fee, the Alaska Volcano Observatory, and University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute.
The GNSS-based Upper Atmospheric Realtime Disaster Information and Alert Network (GUARDIAN) helped detect natural hazards in near real-time. Especially in the Pacific region where GUARDIAN is the only software that provides multi-Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) near real-time (NRT) total electron content (TEC) time series data to the public and scientific community monitoring the area.
The GUARDIAN application detected a magnitude 5.5 earthquake 53 kilometers south, southeast of San Mateo del Mar, Mexico on March 5, 2025.
To continue supporting tropical cyclone research, NASA’s Goddard Earth Sciences Data and Information Services Center (GES DISC) released a collection of provisional data products from the Time-Resolved Observations of Precipitation structure and storm Intensity with a Constellation of SmallSats (TROPICS) mission.
Flying in three low-Earth orbital planes, each SmallSat's radiometer will scan across the entire satellite track at 30 revolutions per minute, providing atmospheric profiles of temperature and water vapor, atmospheric imagery, and precipitation, and cloud ice measurements. Credit: MIT Lincoln Laboratory.
NASA’s Interagency Implementation and Advanced Concepts Team (IMPACT) continued advancing in artificial intelligence (AI) with Earth science data and completed several releases of a new AI Foundation Model for Weather and Climate - Privthi-weather-climate. Esri published three Prithvi-HLS models on their Living Atlas of the World: Burn Scars Segmentation, Crop Classification, and Flood Segmentation. In addition, Croissant, a metadata format for machine learning datasets, was published for use by Dr. Manil Maskey and Dr. Rajat Shinde.
![image shows a track and intensity (Mean Sea Level Pressure [MSLP] and 2-meter sustained wind speed) prediction of Hurricane Ian in September 2022 generated by the Prithvi foundation model.](https://earthdata.nasa.gov/s3fs-public/styles/hds_large/public/2025-03/prithvi-weather.jpg?VersionId=R8k0CZKH7GUZUVx4tIQT0pKO2g88_BTG&itok=6ruh1DmZ)
The map shows a track and intensity (Mean Sea Level Pressure [MSLP] and 2-meter sustained wind speed) prediction of Hurricane Ian in September 2022 generated by the Prithvi foundation model.
In March 2024, the Surface Water Ocean Topography (SWOT) team released a suite of pre-validated Level 1 and Level 2 hydrology and oceanography datasets for measuring terrestrial water surface elevation, slope, width, area, sea surface height, significant wave height and wind speed measurements, and more.
SWOT collects data over the state of Florida via a radar signal that is emitted from one end of the satellite’s 10-meter-wide boom. When the signal hits the surface and gets reflected back, antennae on both ends of the boom receive the signal. Globally, SWOT will measure the height of water in the ocean and in lakes, rivers, and reservoirs on land. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech.
Two new Earth science satellites launched into space in 2024: Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem (PACE) and Polar Radiant Energy in the Far-InfraRed Experiment (PREFIRE). NASA Worldview added 84 new layers for quick viewing and download including the OCI/PACE Chlorophyll A layer and the OCI/PACE True Color Corrected Reflectance layer, which were also the top requested layers from the application. And just in time, the Atmospheric Science Data Center (ASDC) released PREFIRE Level 1, L1A, and L1B data products this month.
The first two PACE data tutorials focus on working with data from PACE's Ocean Color Instrument (OCI), such as phytoplankton concentrations off the East Coast of the United States in April 2024 (shown above). Credit: NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio.
Every year, we look back on our program’s accomplishments and I continue to be proud of how much we build and achieve in one calendar year by working together. Much of the work we do won’t make headlines—adding in a bulk download feature to Earthdata Search, releasing a new version of our Data Product Developer’s Guide for data producers, holding the line on security so that our sites stay operational, agreeing on metadata fields, or determining what data should live in cold storage to save money might be under-the-radar topics to most. But these are the wins throughout the year that make us more efficient, fuel more informative headlines, and drive actionable change. Like the wheels on a bike, we need Earth data to move forward and continue bringing Earth science to action.