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.

PO.DAAC

The Physical Oceanography Distributed Active Archive Center (PO.DAAC) provides data and related information pertaining to the physical processes and conditions of the global oceans, including measurements of ocean winds, temperature, topography, salinity, circulation and currents, and sea ice. PO.DAAC hosts

PO.DAAC has migrated its data archive to the Earthdata Cloud, which is hosted in Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Tip

If any problems contact JPL PO.DAAC support at podaac@podaac.jpl.nasa.gov or the NASA EOSDIS support team support@earthdata.nasa.gov.

Steps to Sync from PO.DAAC

  1. Register with NASA Earthdata Login system

  2. Sync time-variable gravity data using your Earthdata credentials

Can also create a .netrc file for permanently storing NASA Earthdata credentials:

echo "machine urs.earthdata.nasa.gov login <uid> password <password>" >> ~/.netrc
chmod 0600 ~/.netrc

Or set environmental variables for your NASA Earthdata credentials:

export EARTHDATA_USERNAME=<uid>
export EARTHDATA_PASSWORD=<password>

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, PO.DAAC URLs and modification times of GRACE/GRACE-FO data are available through the cmr routine in the utilities module. For AWS instances in us-west-2, CMR queries can access urls for S3 endpoints.

ids,urls,mtimes = gravity_toolkit.utilities.cmr(mission='grace-fo',
   center='JPL', release='RL06', level='L2', product='GSM',
   solution='BA01', provider='POCLOUD', endpoint='s3', verbose=False)

Other Data Access Examples