With the onset of lockdowns and the inability to congregate, SSAI had to quickly pivot our education and outreach approach. So, instead of bringing the public from their homes to our events, we brought the events into the public’s homes. *Photo attribute: Elisa.garcia.1994, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

To accommodate the future growth of its visualization archive and service offerings, the GIBS team is actively migrating operations to a new cloud-based production system. Photo attribute: 百楽兎, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The SSAI-led EMS team successfully upgraded this major, multi-component system to meet the increasing demand for processing and power.

At the first indication of an impending global pandemic, SSAI’s engineering and operations teams initiated a vigorous coordination program with the corresponding customer IT teams to ensure that everything required to remotely maintain standard operations was in place, should a full-scale quarantine be established.

An SSAI-led team successfully employed “loon” balloons to obtain stratospheric observations, especially over the Southern Hemisphere and tropical oceans. Subsequently, SSAI team members began assimilating the Loon balloon winds into the GEOS global data assimilation system (DAS) in support of the Global Modeling Assimilation Office (GMAO).

The SSAI Digital Analytics team successfully transitioned nearly 100 projects distributed among 16 science data and service providers from traditional website metrics collection to digital analytics.

Thanks in part to SSAI scientist Dr. Ranjay M. Shrestha, NASA’s Black Marble product is actively used by multiple government and scientific agencies to measure the impacts of natural disasters on the electricity grid, monitor the effects of conflict and population displacement, map out urbanization, track electrification and light pollution, and understand activity patterns within human settlements.