OpenNEX, a private-public partnership in support of the national climate assessment

The NASA Earth Exchange (NEX) is a collaborative computing platform that has been developed with the objective of bringing scientists together with the software tools, massive global datasets, and supercomputing resources necessary to accelerate research in Earth systems science and global change. NEX is funded as an enabling tool for sustaining the national climate assessment. Over the past five years, researchers have used the NEX platform and produced a number of data sets highly relevant to the National Climate Assessment. These include high-resolution climate projections using different downscaling techniques and trends in historical climate from satellite data. To enable a broader community in exploiting the above datasets, the NEX team partnered with public cloud providers to create the OpenNEX platform. OpenNEX provides ready access to NEX data holdings on a number of public cloud platforms along with pertinent analysis tools and workflows in the form of Machine Images and Docker Containers, lectures and tutorials by experts. We will showcase some of the applications of OpenNEX data and tools by the community on Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and the NEX Sandbox.