Earthdata Download & Data Access Tool (EDDAT)

Trey Stafford
Amy Steiker
Colin Nickerson
Leslie Goldman

2025-05-14

Data Access Tool (DAT)

Web-based Javascript application that provides an interface for users to find, filter, and download data files associated with NSIDC DAAC datasets.

Filter

🕙 Temporal

🌐 Spatial

🔎 Filename

Download

🐍 Python download script

💾 NASA Earthdata Download

🚀 NASA Earthdata Search

DAT Usage and impact

🗓️ Originally released in late 2018

👤 28% of total DAAC data users

🗃️ 739 datasets served

🥧 17% of total NASA DAAC data download volume

Total DAT views for each month from May 2023-April 2025. In total, the DAT served over 100k page views for over 35k users. Note: data for September 2024 is incomplete.

The DAT page for High Mountain Asia 8-meter DEM Mosaics Derived from Optical Imagery, Version 1 (HMA_DEM8m_MOS). The dataset’s coverage is shown in the Map viewer in teal. A user’s spatial polygon selection is shown in red, selecting 80 of the dataset’s 417 files. Annotations show major features and download options.

EDDAT Motivation

ECS decommissioning - July 2026!

  • Update to support cloud collections
  • Replace ECS-based order option with Earthdata Download

Earthdata Download

Earthdata Download is an Electron desktop application designed to facilitate large downloads of granules from Earthdata Search.

Users download and install Earthdata Download to their personal computers.

Earthdata Download

Demo

https://nsidc.org/data/data-access-tool/HMA_DEM8m_MOS/versions/1

Software Architecture

High-level software architecture diagram for the DAT. The DAT is embedded in dataset-specific pages powered by Drupal. Drupal provides the DAT with the dataset name and version. The DAT then uses NASA CMR to query for dataset metadata.

sequenceDiagram
    actor user
    participant DAT-UI
    participant DAT-backend
    participant Earthdata Download

    user->>DAT-UI: Make selections <br>and click EDD button
    DAT-UI ->> Earthdata Download: Open EDD via "deep link" containing getLinks<br> and EDL auth callback URLs
    loop n pages of CMR results
        Earthdata Download->>DAT-backend: Request page of download URLs via getLinks URL
        DAT-backend->>Earthdata Download: Send page of data download URLs
        opt if EDL is required for download
            Earthdata Download->>DAT-backend: request EDL auth
            DAT-backend->>Earthdata Download: open auth callback deep-link, providing EDL token

        end
        Note left of Earthdata Download: Download data<br>to user computer.
    end

High-level sequence diagram showing interaction between the DAT UI, DAT Backend, and Earthdata Download.

Future Evolution

NSIDC DAAC plans to collaborate with teams across the NASA Earth Science Data Systems program to scale the DAT into an enterprise tool, with the goal of serving all NASA Earthdata datasets as an integrated application within the NASA Earthdata website.

CIRES Rendezvous 2025

CIRES Rendezvous 2025 poster

References

Questions?