Prerequisites

A NASA Earthdata Login (EDL) account is required to access data, as well as discover restricted data, from the NASA Earthdata system.

Please visit https://urs.earthdata.nasa.gov to register and manage your Earthdata Login account. This account is free to create and only takes a moment to set up. The Earthdata Login provides a single mechanism for user registration and profile management for all NASA EOSDIS system components (DAACs, tools, and services).

Please refer to this page for more info about how to register to the EDL.

Python Modules¶

The tutorials requires additional Python modules installed in your system. These are listed on the requirements.txt file within the repository. You can install the modules using pip as:

pip install -r requirements.txt

If you use conda environment, you can create and activate the conda environment as

conda env create -f environment.yml
conda activate airborne

The tutorials specifically uses earthaccess python module. earthaccess is a python library to search for, and download or stream NASA Earth science data with just a few lines of code. earthaccess handles authentication with NASA’s Earthdata Login (EDL), search using NASA’s CMR and cloud-access through fsspec.

Compute Environment¶

These tutorials can be run in any personal computing environment (e.g., desktop/laptops), on-premise solution (e.g., High-Performance Computing), or on the Cloud (e.g., Amazon Web Service).

The tutorials use JupyterLab to run the scripts and print the results. JupyterLab is a web-based interactive development environment for notebooks, code, and data.

To install Jupyterlab with pip, run the following on the terminal:

pip install jupyterlab

Once installed, type the following in your terminal:

jupyter lab

The Jupyter notebooks can also be launched to external environments like Google’s Colab, MyBinder or other managed cloud environment like NASA Openscape 2i2c.

You can also clone this repository to the Amazon Sagemaker Studio Lab, which is a free computing environment on the AWS cloud.

GitHub Account¶

You will need a GitHub account to contribute to this repository via pull requests or to access a JupyterHub environment such as NASA Openscape’s 2i2c.

This document will guide you through the steps of signing up for a free personal GitHub account.

Git¶

Once you have a GitHub account, it is important to understand fundamental Git concepts. Familiarize yourself with Git by referring to this introductory guide and this handy cheatsheet.

This installation guide provides instructions on how to install Git in your system (Windows, Linux, or Mac) if it is not already installed.

GitHub Authentication¶

There are several ways to authenticate your GitHub account. We will use a SSH authentication method.

Generate a new SSH key: Open your terminal (or Git Bash on Windows) and run the following command:

ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -C "your_email@example.com"

Copy the SSH key: Copy the contents of your SSH key file, located at ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub, to your clipboard.
Add the SSH Key to GitHub: Navigate to https://github.com/settings/keys on your GitHub and click the “New SSH Key” button. Provide a title for your key and paste the contents you copied in Step 2 into the key field. Click “Add SSH Key” to save.

You are now set up to use SSH for connecting to GitHub.

Git Clone¶

To get started, clone this GEDI data tutorials git repository by running the following command on your terminal (or Git bash in Windows):

git clone git@github.com:ornldaac/gedi_tutorials.git

Earthdata Login¶