Data Producer and Data User Needs for Airborne and Field Earth Science Research Measurements

This presentation summarizes information on the needs of data producers and data users gathered from the combination of a March 2022 two-day on-line workshop and the nearly 30-year history of the NASA Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS) Distributed Active Archive Centers (DAACs).  The workshop included over 100 participants, primarily from the United States, with the first day focusing on the needs of data users and the second day focusing on the needs of data producers.  Based on both the workshop and the collective experience of the DAACs, both data producers and data users benefit substantially when there is an early partnership between the research project producing the data and the data archive which will publish the data.  The highly heterogenous nature of airborne and field research data presents  particular challenges for discovery, particularly in the context of systems that are optimized for discovery and delivery of on-orbit Earth science data.  The DAACs experience also demonstrates an evolution of best practices for working with this kind of data.  However, systems which have been in operation for decades often have technical debt, which can constrain the evolution of the research data infrastructure.  The migration of EOSDIS into a commercial cloud environment presents several interesting opportunities for addressing the data producer and data user needs identified by the workshop and experience of the DAACs.