NASA Earthdata

NASA Data Distribution Centers

The NASA Earth Science Data Information Systems Project funds and operates 12 Distributed Active Archive Centers (DAACs) throughout the United States. These centers have recently transitioned from ftp to https servers. The https updates are designed to increase performance and improve security during data retrieval. NASA Earthdata uses OAuth2, an approach to authentication that protects your personal information.

NSIDC

The National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) DAAC provides data and information for snow and ice processes, particularly interactions among snow, ice, atmosphere, and ocean, in support of research in global change detection and model validation. If any problems contact NSIDC support at nsidc@nsidc.org or the NASA EOSDIS support team support@earthdata.nasa.gov.

Steps to Sync from NSIDC

  1. Register with NASA Earthdata Login system

  2. After registering, login to the system

  3. Add NSIDC_DATAPOOL_OPS and nsidc-daacdata applications to Earthdata

  4. Copy your NASA Earthdata credentials or create a .netrc file to store your credentials permanently

echo "machine urs.earthdata.nasa.gov login <uid> password <password>" >> ~/.netrc
chmod 0600 ~/.netrc
  1. Sync data from NSIDC as HDF5 or zarr

NASA Common Metadata Repository

The NASA Common Metadata Repository (CMR) is a catalog of all data and service metadata records contained as part of NASA’s Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS). Querying the CMR system is a way of quickly performing a search through the NASA Earthdata archive. Basic queries for the granule names and NSIDC URLs of NASA ICESat-2 data are available through the cmr routine in the utilities module.

ids,urls = icesat2_toolkit.utilities.cmr(product='ATL06',release='006',
    cycles=[3,4,5],tracks=752,granules=[10,11,12],verbose=False)

Some more advanced spatial and temporal CMR queries are available as part of the NSIDC data subsetting toolkit. Additionally, the community icepyx set of tools includes multiple spatial, temporal and orbital query options for ICESat-2 data along with subsetting options using the NSIDC services API.

Other Data Access Examples