NASA TOPS ScienceCore: climaterisk
In the framework of the Transform to Open Science (TOPS) initiative, a comprehensive program of activities by NASA to support the advancement of science towards openness, MetaDocencia in collaboration with the fellow community 2i2c committed to developing specific educational content for TOPS ScienceCore. This proposal brings together curriculum modules associated with different specific disciplines, with the aim of increasing the knowledge and skills necessary to leverage NASA’s open tools and technologies for Earth and space research. Our training module focuses on the analysis of open satellite data useful for understanding and predicting floods, forest fires, and droughts.
Context
Climate change is making it increasingly difficult to predict and manage the risk of forest fires, droughts, and floods. It is no longer enough to assume that what has been normal and historical over the last century will occur with the same frequency in the future. These natural hazards are inherently linked to changing distributions, in time and space, of surface waters, precipitation, vegetation, and land use. At the same time, there are now hundreds of petabytes of relevant Earth science data available through NASA’s Earthdata cloud, which can be used to understand and forecast these water-related environmental risks. With a dramatically growing volume of Earth science data year after year, it is important for scientists to understand how open science and cloud computing can be used to analyze and assess reproducibly the changing profile of risks from forest fires, droughts, and floods.
Objectives
This proposal, framed within the ideas of NASA TOPS ScienceCore, will offer resources to identify, extract, analyze, visualize, and report on data available through NASA’s Earthdata cloud, mainly from remote sensing, for three different scenarios: forest fires, drought, and flood risk. The module reinforces the principles of reproducibility and transparency, and workflows in line with open science.
Expected outcomes
The proposal is framed as an extension of OpenCore, NASA’s open science curriculum. All course materials will remain open, available in English and Spanish, and with content accessible in different dimensions. The proposal is offered as a collection of Jupyter notebooks on GitHub, with supporting material for teaching the course using the cloud either in-person or remotely. After completing this module, students will be able to adapt and reuse the scenarios for their own open science objectives related to environmental risks such as forest fires, droughts, and floods, which are common worldwide but require analysis at the regional level.
