NASA Earth science data now in ArcGIS Living Atlas

By jnally on 22 January, 2025

A false-colour GIS image of a hurricane, part of NASA's Earth science data now available on the ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World — *A visualisation from NASA Earthdata’s Early IMERG Precipitation Rate product in Esri’s Living Atlas of the World, shows rainfall from Hurricane Ida. Courtesy NASA.*

NASA datasets geared for GIS users are now available through a collaboration with Esri’s ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World.

The Atlas now includes more than 120 of NASA’s most popular Earth observation products, all formatted for GIS, such as true-colour, corrected-reflectance Earth imagery from the MODIS instrument.

“I like to think of Living Atlas as Google for GIS users,” said Leah Schwizer, manager of NASA’s Earth Science Data Systems Geographic Information Systems Team (EGIST) and leader of the project to bring NASA Earth science data to the Living Atlas.

“Users go there knowing everything they find will be ready to go and work in GIS software.”

The call to add NASA data to the collection came time and again from users NASA spoke with at conferences, workshops and other events. “We heard over and over ‘I go to Living Atlas first — is NASA in Living Atlas?’” said Schwizer.

“For a long time, we would actually use Earthdata Search APIs to access the data and then build our own web services around it for users,” said Charlie Hoffman, Esri’s account manager for NASA.

“In the last couple of years, we’ve been partnering with NASA to host and manage its own GIS-formatted data layers so the agency can get maximum attribution.”

Schwizer says that “The data is very curated, and it must meet high quality requirements before it’s added to the repository.”