Advancing FAIR Data within NASA’s WDS Trusted Physical Oceanography Repository

Over the past decade, NASA’s Physical Oceanography Distributed Active Archive Center (PO.DAAC) has made tremendous progress toward improving the findability, accessibility, interoperability and re-usability of its data holdings. The progress made thus far has positioned PO.DAAC as a community leader in addressing a wide range of Big Earth Data challenges, all of which simultaneously address FAIR data principles, not just from a data management perspective, but also from a data user perspective. As of 2019, the PO.DAAC has become officially recognized by the World Data System as a Trusted Repository, thus obtaining the official CoreTrustSeal for Data Repositories Requirements. In addition to showing how we met the requirements of the CoreTrustSeal certification, we will present the motivations, current implementations, and planned deployments supporting Big Earth Data architecture, frameworks and services to both sustain and advance the usability of current and future data holdings. Cloud storage architecture presents new opportunities to be exploited to the benefit of all data users, of which the following are being considered for development by PO.DAAC: cloud-based and on-demand data analysis/visualization/GIS tools and services, virtual machine environments to support legacy analysis software and toolkits, open-source and web-based development environments, open-source code sharing, APIs for interactive data/metadata search and extraction, and an overall more consistent user experience in data tools/services. Even though PO.DAAC’s cloud evolution is still in development, some headway has already been made toward frameworks and services that would readily extend levels of support for data within a cloud environment, including: 1) web services REST APIs for data granule search, subsetting and extraction, 2) web services toolkits and data recipes, 3) HTTPS-based WebDAV virtual drive mounting, 4) REST APIs for visualization and analytics, 5) interoperable data/metadata formats and metadata specifications 6) leveraging compression capabilities for increased I/O performance, 7) containerization to make software ubiquitously deployable, 8) consistent software version-control through GitHub, 9) improved commercial and 3^rd party data searching through Schema.org-compliant JSON-LD tagging, and 10) open-source licensing of user-oriented software and tools. Pre-launch preparations for Surface Water Ocean Topography and Sentinel-6 missions have placed the PO.DAAC on NASA’s leading edge for cloud storage and analysis-ready architecture, and represents a fundamental paradigm shift from legacy on-premise data frameworks and services. Examples of current implementations will be showcased, along with an overview of technologies and frameworks that are planned for future deployment.