“Accessible data and tools are essential for advancing scientific research and promoting informed decision-making,” said Dr. Hazem Mahmoud, a science lead at ASDC and a developer of the GitHub page. “By making data and resources readily available through this GitHub, we enable a broader community of researchers, policymakers, and educators to address critical environmental challenges and improve air quality and public health globally."
ASDC used the open-source scientific publishing system Quatro to configure the GitHub page’s files and action workflows to improve their presentation and readability. The page’s key features include a navigation sidebar, internal notebook navigation tables, and links to ASDC resources to make it easier for users to discover, explore, and learn from the tutorials.
NASA data experts recently walked researchers, college faculty, graduate students, and others through using the repository during a workshop at the January 2025 American Meteorological Society Annual Meeting. The workshop was led by Elizabeth Joyner, community engagement lead for NASA’s Earth Science Data Systems Program, along with Mahmoud and ASDC support scientist Dr. Alexander Radkevich.
The event centered around using datasets and tools managed by ASDC within an Openscapes cloud-computing environment called 2i2c. Attendees were instructed on how to download ASDC’s Jupyter notebooks and set them up in 2i2c. The presenters also highlighted newly developed notebooks comparing gas columns data retrieved by the TEMPO instrument in orbit with measurements from ground-based Pandora spectrometers.
In particular, the workshop presenters noted efficient ways for searching and downloading data available in Earthdata’s holdings using the Earthaccess python library as well as shared methods for statistically analyzing the retrievals.
“As everyone is new to the cloud and cloud-computing, the GitHub page was developed to empower our science community with some new python libraries to access atmospheric data and introduce new users to accessible tools for subsetting, analyzing and visualizing TEMPO data and comparing it with other sources,” said Mahmoud. “It aims to streamline the process, foster collaboration, and support air quality research.”
Joyner emphasized the importance of streamlining data work because Earth data scientists experience the effects of the 80/20 rule, which asserts that 80% of researcher time is spent on finding, accessing, and preparing data, while only 20% of time is left for actually analyzing and developing insights.
“Much time is spent searching for the optimal datasets, downloading, reformatting, and other processing of data that can drain away the limited time available,” said Joyner. “NASA is committed to making more time for science by providing users with more efficient workflows, resources, and support such as the GitHub, resources, and training modeled here.”
For more information about ASDC and TEMPO, visit the following resources:
- NASA's ASDC website
- TEMPO Storymap: Learn more about the TEMPO mission to monitor air quality across North America with step-by-step video tutorials of its useful tools and services.
