Characterizing Wildfires in Western US.: A Cloud-based Case Study for Interdisciplinary Research using NASA Resources

This presentation will demonstrate a case study of interdisciplinary research done in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud platform, in addition to in the local machine. We conduct data analysis next to data by leveraging various cloud-based data in NASA Earthdata Cloud, which are distributed by different missions/NASA Distributed Active Archive Centers (DAACs), and cloud computing resources at NASA. For instance, we directly access multiple datasets stored in the AWS Simple Storage Service (S3) buckets using a Python Jupyter notebook through a JupyterHub interface hosted in AWS (without having to download data), and conduct data analysis next to data in the cloud. We will also show how to share the research results following Open Source policy.

This case study characterizes the change in wildfire events in the western United States during the past 20 years. In particular, we focus on the wildfires in California in 2021, one of the most severe wildfire years occurring in the most recent 20 years in California. We will analyze the possible causes of wildfires, such as drought conditions and climate variability, and examine the impacts of wildfires on air quality and atmospheric composition, and on land cover.

We will examine the data distributed by the NASA Goddard Earth Sciences Data and Information Services Center (GES DISC), including aerosols and meteorological data from the NASA Modern-Era Retrospective analysis for Research and Applications version 2 (MERRA-2), precipitation from the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) and Global Precipitation Climate Project (GPCP), and aerosol index from Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI). We also utilize the data distributed by the Physical Oceanography (PO) DAAC, such as Sea Surface Temperature (SST) data from the Group for High Resolution Sea Surface Temperature (GHRSST), and the data distributed by Land Processes (LP) DAAC, such as Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI).