Amendment 51: Final Text and Due Date for A.46 Advancing Collaborative Connections for Earth System Science.

This amendment releases final text and announces the final due date for program element A.46 Advancing Collaborative Connections for Earth System Science (ACCESS).

The primary focus of this ACCESS program element is to help address data management, discoverability, and utilization challenges faced by users and curators of NASA’s Earth science data. Although focused on information technology implementation and deployment, the ACCESS program is targeted at addressing existing and anticipated future needs of the research and applied science communities. One of those needs is in the area of machine learning (ML). However, adoption of ML techniques relies heavily on availability of high-quality large training datasets. Thus, in addition to technology implementation, this program element seeks ways to create new training datasets for ML. Proposal teams must include both information technology and Earth science expertise and must be tied directly to and demonstrate specific issues facing Earth science and applied science users interacting with NASA's Earth science data.

The secondary thread of the ACCESS program aims at providing support to existing widely used open source tools and libraries. Open source tools and libraries have become a critical component to research activities and need to be continuously updated to support new data sets, efficient processing, maintenance and security. Proposals for this thread must include teams that have demonstrated experience in developing, maintaining and supporting open source tools that are widely used by Earth science research and applications communities. Additionally, these proposals must demonstrate the ability to work with the targeted open source software organizations.

Notices of intent are requested by December 12, 2019 and the due date proposals is January 30, 2020.

Technical questions concerning this program element may be directed to Kevin Murphy at kevin.j.murphy@nasa.gov and Manil Maskey at manil.maskey@nasa.gov.