Prerequisites & Homework

Prerequisites

To follow along hands-on during the Workshop, please do the following (20 minutes). All software or accounts are free.

  1. GitHub username
    • Create a GitHub account (if you don’t already have one) at https://github.com. Follow optional advice on choosing your username
    • The workshop signup form asks for your GitHub username - this allows us to enable you access to a cloud environment during the workshop.
    • Remember your username and password; you will need to be logged in during the workshop!
  2. Earthdata Login account
    • Create an Earthdata Login account (if you don’t already have one) at https://urs.earthdata.nasa.gov
    • Remember your username and password; you will need to download or access cloud data during the workshop and beyond.
  3. Get comfortable
    • Consider your computer set-up in advance, including an external monitor if possible. You can follow along in Jupyter Hub on your own computer while also watching an instructor demo over WebEx (or equivalent).

Pre-Workshop Homework

We recommmend watching or walking through the following tutorials ahead of the workshop, to become familiar with topics that we won’t have time to take a deep dive into during the workshop, but which are important pieces in accessing (simulated) SWOT data hosted in the NASA Earthdata Cloud. You will get the chance to ask any questions regarding the material covered in these pre-workshop tutorials during the workshop.

  1. Tutorial: Search for PO.DAAC data using the Earthdata Search GUI (15 min)
    • Generic tutorial on how to search and retrieve download or access links for PO.DAAC data using the Earthdata Search GUI.
  2. Tutorial: NASA Earthdata Authentication (5 minutes)
    • Tutorial for generating a netrc file, which enables programmatic (command line) NASA Earthdata Authentication. If you don’t have a NASA Earthdata user login account, you can set up a free one quickly. See the Prerequisites section above.
  3. Tutorial: Download data from the NASA Earthdata Cloud using the PO.DAAC data-subscriber (12 minutes)
    • While the workshop will focus on data access within the cloud, data download from the NASA Earthdata Cloud is still possbile. This tutorial will walk you through how to download simulated SWOT L2 data from the PO.DAAC archive in Earthdata Cloud (hosted in AWS), using the PO.DAAC data-subscriber tool.