NSF Unidata Reimagined: Data Services to Advance Convergent Earth Systems Science

NSF Unidata is a community data facility for the Earth Systems Sciences (ESS), established in 1984 by U.S. universities with sponsorship from the U. S. National Science Foundation. NSF Unidata exists to engage and serve researchers and educators who are advancing the frontiers of their fields; we support their efforts by creating opportunities for community members from many backgrounds and disciplines to share data, knowledge, methods, and expertise. As part of this effort, we strive to provide well-integrated data services and software tools that address the entire geoscientific data lifecycle, from locating and retrieving useful data, through the process of analyzing and visualizing data either locally or remotely, to curating and sharing the results. NSF Unidata currently serves more than 1,500 universities and colleges worldwide, which form the core of a member community spanning thousands of government and research institutions worldwide that rely on Unidata products and services.

Dramatic changes in the technological, scientific, educational, and public policy landscape are transforming the ways our community members conduct their research and educate new generations of scientists. To meet these challenges, Unidata is reimagining how the program can best fulfill its mission. This proposal provides a description of how Unidata plans to serve its community going forward by focusing on four types of activities:

• Providing Data and Tools: ensuring fair and equitable access to ESS and other data from a variety of sources, along with cutting-edge tools to analyze and visualize that data.
• Reducing Barriers to Participation: building partnerships with minority-serving institutions and under-resourced groups to increase engagement and collaboration, helping to build a larger, more inclusive community of ESS practitioners.
• Fostering Community Action: engaging community members to advance adoption of initiatives like FAIR and CARE data principles to promote Open Science concepts, strengthening ESS teaching and research.
• Providing Innovative Technical Solutions: guiding the ESS community toward technical solutions that leverage the most useful innovations in AI/ML, modern open source software, and cloud-centric data-proximate analysis.

Within these broad categories, Unidata proposes a variety of actions guided by the concept of convergence science, wherein individuals from across many disciplines collaborate to address “Grand Challenge” questions in areas such as climate change, ocean health, and natural disaster resilience. Unidata’s part in this endeavor centers on the creation of community hubs, which will bring together varied data, software tools for analysis and visualization, and learning resources to inform the community members who gather to find innovative courses of action with respect to these complex problems.

In this presentation, I’ll describe how NSF Unidata is reimagining its future activities in delivering a comprehensive suite of products and services to advance Earth Systems Science research and education by partnering with a broad range of users in the community.