Curating information to guide NASA Earthdata users into the cloud

Having migrated all its datasets to the cloud this past year, NASA's Physical Oceanography Distributed Active Archive Center (PO.DAAC) has recognized data accessibility is not synonymous with data availability. Accessing and analyzing data in the cloud can be an intimidating task, especially for new users or those comfortable with pre-existing local (e.g. local computer) workflows. When new at something, it can be difficult to even know where to begin. We at PO.DAAC, together with our other DAAC colleagues through NASA Openscapes, have been asking ourselves how to curate our data and information so that end users from a variety of backgrounds have guidance on specific cloud access pathways. Here, we present a series of diagrams we have developed that outline high level introduction topics, delineate common cloud terminology, and describe general data workflows, access, tools and services. We have also created a NASA Earthdata Cloud data Workflow Cheatsheet as a one-stop-shop linking to data recipe tutorials and informational websites for users who are starting to take conceptual pieces and explore their own workflows. These diagrams have been implemented in the NASA Earthdata Cloud Cookbook developed by the NASA Openscapes team as a resource across all NASA DAACs. We encourage feedback and discussion on how best to improve such data user resources to help us all as we enter into the cloud data era!