2026 July ESIP Meeting: Full Schedule

We are a home for Earth science data and computing professionals. Our sessions bring together the community for hands-on, interdisciplinary deep dives as we explore "Bridging Divides: Data, Technology, Community" this year. Learn more about this theme on the ESIP Meetings page.

Session and plenary recordings will be published on the ESIP YouTube Channel.

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7:30am CDT

Breakfast

Tuesday July 28, 2026 7:30am - 8:30am CDT

Zlotnik Foyer

Registration & breakfast

Audience
All meeting attendees

Tuesday July 28, 2026 7:30am - 8:30am CDT
Zlotnik Foyer

Meals & Breaks

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8:30am CDT

Welcome & Opening Plenary

Tuesday July 28, 2026 8:30am - 10:00am CDT

Zlotnik Ballroom (1,2,3,4)

Sign-in & Notes

Welcome to the 2026 July ESIP Meeting!

Audience
All meeting attendees

Speakers

Sarah Cooley

Tuesday July 28, 2026 8:30am - 10:00am CDT
Zlotnik Ballroom (1,2,3,4)

Plenary

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10:00am CDT

Break

Tuesday July 28, 2026 10:00am - 11:00am CDT

Rowling Hall Floor 3 Foyer

Break & socialize

Audience
All meeting attendees

Tuesday July 28, 2026 10:00am - 11:00am CDT
Rowling Hall Floor 3 Foyer

Meals & Breaks

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11:00am CDT

ESDIS AI/ML Strategies

Tuesday July 28, 2026 11:00am - 12:30pm CDT

Location TBA

Sign-in & Notes

We find ourselves in a position where the near-exponential growth of our archive is causing several problems: our archive grows faster than our community's ability to navigate it, and faster than our ability to manage it. To combat this, on the user side, researchers increasingly work through AI-assisted tools. If NASA data is not findable and usable in those environments, we cede our role as the authoritative source for Earth science data. On the curation side, NASA needs to increasingly rely on automation. We will present our AI strategies targeting four areas: Production (AI-powered pipeline segments, mission data and metadata development); Infrastructure (open machine-readable interfaces, intelligent user support triage); Access (dataset matchmaking via external AI assistants, semantic discovery as a service); Analysis (Earth science notebook extension in JupyterLab, reproducibility scaffolding).

Audience
Anyone who wants or needs to employ AI/ML processes in their work

Speakers

Doug Newman

Science Data Systems Lead, NASA/ESDIS

NASA ESDIS Systems Engineer.

Tuesday July 28, 2026 11:00am - 12:30pm CDT
Location TBA

AI & Intelligent Systems

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11:00am CDT

Modern Tools and Interoperable Workflows for Geospatial Discovery

Tuesday July 28, 2026 11:00am - 12:30pm CDT

Location TBA

Sign-in & Notes

Building an open and collaborative geospatial community depends on creating opportunities to share emerging technologies, interoperable tools, and practical workflows. This session brings together participants of all experience levels to explore new approaches to analysis and data access while encouraging collaboration and idea sharing. Speakers and developers will showcase community-focused tools through approachable demonstrations designed to provide attendees with resources they can immediately apply in their own work. Pre-managed environments such as Google Colab will be used to share live coding examples, web tools, and other resources.

Audience
Geospatial scientists, educators, students, and data providers interested in learning about newer geospatial tools, workflows, and data formats; open to coding and learning new software

Speakers

Chris Battisto

Tuesday July 28, 2026 11:00am - 12:30pm CDT
Location TBA

AI & Intelligent Systems

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11:00am CDT

Real-Time Field Science Applications

Tuesday July 28, 2026 11:00am - 12:30pm CDT

Location TBA

Sign-in & Notes

Earth Science Field Campaigns require applications and tools that assist with real-time tracking, products, and documentation. Various organizations have developed applications with similar capabilities. This session brings together managers and software engineers who manage these applications to learn from each other, enabling each entity to build better applications. Applications to be discussed include: FARM Guru (real-time mobile radar data displays), ARM Field Campaign Dashboard (real-time data plots and documentation), NASA FCX (field data product viewer), SASSI (severe weather comms and real-time data), and NSF NCAR EOL Field Catalog (real-time field campaign platform tracking, documentation, and data product viewer). Session will close with a 25-minute panel discussion.

Audience
ESIP Envirosensing Cluster members; anyone who works in earth observing science and wants to learn about real-time field science applications

Speakers

Carol Ruchti

Scientist, NSF National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR)

Chris Lenhardt

EOL DMS Facility Manager, NSF NCAR

Chirag Shah

Environmental Data Science Engineer, Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Jacquie Witte

Scientist/Data Manager, NSF NCAR Earth Observing Laboratory

Trevor White

Research Engineer IV, Flexible Array of Radars and Mesonets

Geoffrey Stano

GHRC DAAC Scientist, University of Alabama in Huntsville

Erik Rasmussen

Tuesday July 28, 2026 11:00am - 12:30pm CDT
Location TBA

Community, Education, & Capacity Building

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11:00am CDT

Data Preservation in a Time of Uncertainty

Tuesday July 28, 2026 11:00am - 12:30pm CDT

Location TBA

Sign-in & Notes

The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at UT Austin supports large-scale compute and data storage across all areas of science, with the NSF-supported Leadership Class Computing Facility (LCCF) now coming online. NCAR approached TACC to implement a more effective disaster recovery approach than storing tapes in a fireproof vault, leading to a transfer of 15 PB of data over R&E networks beginning February 2026. This session details the preliminary design work, technological tradeoffs weighed, and how transfers of this scale can be accomplished and become commonplace. It will also discuss how TACC resources are available to the broader ESIP community.

Audience
Council of Data Facilities representatives; researchers or project leads working with significant data resources; representatives from high performance networking providers, NSF-sponsored computing centers, and universities with large-scale computing centers and data repositories

Speakers

Jennifer Schopf

University of Texas at Austin / TACC

Thomas Cram

Software Engineer, NCAR

Doug Schuster

Section Manager, Information Science and Services Section, NSF National Center for Atmospheric Research

Tuesday July 28, 2026 11:00am - 12:30pm CDT
Location TBA

Data Stewardship, Governance, & Resilience

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11:00am CDT

From Bespoke to Universal: How Standards Can Support NASA's Tool Convergence Effort

Tuesday July 28, 2026 11:00am - 12:30pm CDT

Location TBA

Sign-in & Notes

This session will seek to bring tool developers together with metadata curators to explore how we can work together to make more data more usable through improved standards compliance and more robust metadata. Metadata curation, data product design, standards development, and software engineering are typically done by completely separate teams, but software that makes Earth science data accessible requires standardized formats and data models, and robust, standards-compliant metadata. As ESDIS moves away from bespoke data tools toward an integrated environment of shared, enterprise-class tools and services, this session aims to bring together diverse groups to understand how to work more cooperatively to improve data FAIRness.

Audience
Metadata curators, software engineers, and data producers (scientists) who want to improve data FAIRness

Speakers

Elisabeth Huffer

Information Systems Engineer, Lingua Logica

Steve Olding

ESCO Team Lead, NASA ESCO

Ge Peng

Chief Research Scientist, SSAI/NASA ESDIS

Ed Armstrong

Tuesday July 28, 2026 11:00am - 12:30pm CDT
Location TBA

Standards, Metadata, & Interoperability

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12:30pm CDT

Lunch

Tuesday July 28, 2026 12:30pm - 2:00pm CDT

Tejas Dining Room

Lunch & networking

Audience
All meeting attendees

Tuesday July 28, 2026 12:30pm - 2:00pm CDT
Tejas Dining Room

Meals & Breaks

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2:00pm CDT

The National Spatial Data Infrastructure: Progress and the Path to a NextGeneration SDI Specification

Tuesday July 28, 2026 2:00pm - 3:30pm CDT

Location TBA

Sign-in & Notes

Accessing spatial data shouldn’t be this hard. Scientists routinely struggle to find
current, authoritative, and validated datasets across agencies and platforms. This
session directly addresses those pain points by bringing together policy, technology,
and community voices to focus on practical solutions that make data easier to find,
access, and use.

We will connect federal SDI governance, nextgeneration OGC standards, and
AIassisted data discovery to show how the National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI)
is evolving to better support Earth science. The session will provide an update on
progress to date, outline the current status of the NSDI, and—most importantly—invite
direct input from the Earth science community through an open Request for
Information (RFI). Participants will see concrete examples of how modern SDI
approaches can reduce datawrangling time, improve metadata quality, and streamline
crossagency discovery workflows.

The NSDI is a foundational framework for linking Earth science data producers and
consumers across organizational and jurisdictional boundaries. Modernizing the NSDI
directly supports ESIP’s “Bridging Divides” theme by connecting data, technology, and
community in ways that reduce friction, improve interoperability, and accelerate
scientific insight.

Speakers

Frank Pichel

Rich Frazier

Senior Advisor Geospatial Technology, United States Geological Survey, Federal Geographic Data Committee

Rich serves as the Technical Advisor for the Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) Secretariat. The FGDC leads and supports the National Spatial Data Infrastructure Strategy and spatial data policy development in the United States. The FGDC also coordinates with international organizations... Read More →

Megan Compton

Senior NSDI Advisor, Federal Geographic Data Committee

As a leader in geospatial and tech, I’m driving the National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI)—basically, I’m mapping the future (literally). I manage the National Geospatial Advisory Committee (NGAC), guiding our brilliant members to tackle complex geospatial challenges, while... Read More →

Joy Pochatila

Ingo Simonis

Tuesday July 28, 2026 2:00pm - 3:30pm CDT
Location TBA

Cloud-Native & Data Infrastructure

2:00pm CDT

Virtual Stores: Bridging Archival Formats with Cloud-Native Access (Part 1)

Tuesday July 28, 2026 2:00pm - 3:30pm CDT

Location TBA

Sign-in & Notes

Virtual store technology enables network-optimized access to archival file formats and is gaining traction at large data providers such as NASA. This two-part session focuses on knowledge sharing and community building for anyone adopting virtual store technology. Part 1 features presentations from varied data producers within ESIP on how the technology is being adopted: pipeline systems, virtual stores in production, and complex data use cases. Part 2 (following session) is a working session with breakout groups focused on iterating on the virtual stores feasibility report, discussing standards requirements (e.g. GeoZarr), and hands-on building of virtual datasets.

Audience
Data engineers, data-related program managers, cloud data users

Speakers

Aimee Barciauskas

Software Engineer, Development Seed

Owen Littlejohns

Transformation Train System Architect, NASA EED-3 / INNOVIM

Danny Kaufman

TEMPO Lead Data Scientist, NASA ASDC / Booz Allen Hamilton

Chris Battisto

Max Jones

Cloud Engineer, Development Seed

Tuesday July 28, 2026 2:00pm - 3:30pm CDT
Location TBA

Cloud-Native & Data Infrastructure

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2:00pm CDT

Failure Isn't Failing

Tuesday July 28, 2026 2:00pm - 3:30pm CDT

Location TBA

Sign-in & Notes

We hide our failures. Our resumes and CVs sing of our accomplishments, but not the twisted path we took to get there. In this session, three community leaders will proudly tell tales of their professional failures: the impact they had, what their response was, and with hindsight, what it might have been in a kinder universe. This session is offered in support of every researcher with imposter syndrome, every scientist who didn't get an experiment to work, and everyone who had a dream job turned nightmare. Significant audience participation is expected.

Audience
Early career researchers who want to learn how others have failed and pivoted; experienced professionals who want to know they aren't alone; everyone in between

Speakers

Jennifer Schopf

University of Texas at Austin / TACC

Denise Hills

Project Manager, Advanced Resources International

Long tail data, data preservation, connecting physical samples to digital information, geoscience policy, science communication.

ORCID: 0000-0001-9581-4944

... Read More →

Tuesday July 28, 2026 2:00pm - 3:30pm CDT
Location TBA

Community, Education, & Capacity Building

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2:00pm CDT

Developing Community Recommendations for Enhanced Data Impact through Governance and Stewardship

Tuesday July 28, 2026 2:00pm - 3:30pm CDT

Location TBA

Sign-in & Notes

This session is the third and final in a series on how connecting data governance and stewardship efforts across organizations can enhance interoperability and maximize impact of Earth science data. A report from the July 2025 ESIP session has been published to ESIP Zenodo (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17990054). In this final session, organizers will share analysis and progress since then and invite participants to contribute to the development of community recommendations for the Earth science community on enhancing data impact through improved interoperability.

Audience
Data stewards, developers, architects, policy-makers, and anyone interested in improving interoperability of their research data through data governance and stewardship practices

Speakers

Ge Peng

Chief Research Scientist, SSAI/NASA ESDIS

Emanuel Söding

Data Manager, Helmholtz Metadata Collaboration @ GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre

Douglas Rao

Senior Research Scholar, CISESS-NC/NOAA NCEI

I am currently a Senior Research Scholar for AI/ML at NC Institute for Climate Studies, affiliated with NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information and NOAA Center for AI through Cooperative Institute for Satellite Earth System Studies.

Jessica Burnett

Program Executive, NASA

Sara Lubkin

DAAC Engineer, NASA/ESDIS

Tuesday July 28, 2026 2:00pm - 3:30pm CDT
Location TBA

Data Stewardship, Governance, & Resilience

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2:00pm CDT

To PID or Not to PID: Advanced Topics in Physical Sample Data Curation

Tuesday July 28, 2026 2:00pm - 3:30pm CDT

Location TBA

Sign-in & Notes

The ESIP Physical Sample Curation Cluster recently published a guide for scientific authors on 'Publishing Open Research Using Physical Samples.' This interactive session builds on that work to spur new discussion on advanced topics in open research using physical samples, with the goal of identifying places for further best practices development. Three 8-minute presentations will showcase key advanced topics, followed by ~40 minutes in breakout groups using large sticky note posters to document use cases and outline proposed guidance. The session closes with ~20 minutes of report-backs and discussion on next steps. Seeded discussion topics include CRediT taxonomy and samples, and field campaigns.

Audience
Researchers who use physical samples; curators of physical sample collections; infrastructure developers and data stewards who work on systems containing digital sample identifiers; ESIP community members with connections to scholarly journal infrastructure and DOI registries

Speakers

Natalie Raia

Earth Science Cyberinfrastructure Research Principal, University of Arizona

Natalie Raia is a Earth Science Cyberinfrastructure Research Scientist in the College of Information Science at the University of Arizona. She collaborates with library and information scientists, systems engineers, researchers, publishers, and academic societies to develop and drive... Read More →

Andrea Thomer

Associate Professor, University of Arizona, College of Information Science

Joshua Birkebak

Tuesday July 28, 2026 2:00pm - 3:30pm CDT
Location TBA

Standards, Metadata, & Interoperability

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3:30pm CDT

Break

Tuesday July 28, 2026 3:30pm - 4:00pm CDT

Rowling Hall Floor 3 Foyer

Break & socialize

Audience
All meeting attendees

Tuesday July 28, 2026 3:30pm - 4:00pm CDT
Rowling Hall Floor 3 Foyer

Meals & Breaks

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4:00pm CDT

Trusted Data and AI as a Potential Trusted Data Stream for Disasters

Tuesday July 28, 2026 4:00pm - 5:30pm CDT

Location TBA

Sign-in & Notes

This session addresses when and where data are available for disaster response and recovery efforts. It will discuss latency for data collection, formerly available services that have been discontinued and where archives exist, failures of early warning systems, and how AI can aid in response and recovery — including the pitfalls of relying on AI for analyzing disaster-related data. The session features the Trusted Data Now! interface, developed by DLC fellow Jeil Oh, which gathers trusted data resources in one centralized location. The session will conclude with a roundtable discussion with audience input.

Audience
Scientists and researchers; data community; decision-making community (e.g. agencies); students; ESIP Disaster Lifecycle and Wildfires Cluster members

Speakers

Maggi Glasscoe

Researcher, University of Alabama in Huntsville

Dave Jones

CEO, StormCenter Communications

GeoCollaborate, is an SBIR Phase III technology (Yes, its a big deal) that enables real-time data access through web services, sharing and collaboration across multiple platforms. We call GeoCollaborate a 'Collaborative Common Operating Picture' that empowers decision making, situational... Read More →

Bandana Kar

ZhiQiang Chen

Tuesday July 28, 2026 4:00pm - 5:30pm CDT
Location TBA

AI & Intelligent Systems

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4:00pm CDT

Virtual Stores: Bridging Archival Formats with Cloud-Native Access (Part 2)

Tuesday July 28, 2026 4:00pm - 5:30pm CDT

Location TBA

Sign-in & Notes

Part 2 of the Virtual Stores session. This working session has participants forming breakout groups, each with a lead, focused on: iterating on the virtual stores feasibility report; discussion topics such as how to integrate search with access and what standards are required (e.g. GeoZarr); and hands-on work building a virtual dataset. Virtual stores enable network-optimized access to archival file formats and are gaining traction at large data providers such as NASA. The goal is knowledge sharing and community building for anyone adopting virtual store technology.

Audience
Data engineers, data-related program managers, cloud data users

Speakers

Aimee Barciauskas

Software Engineer, Development Seed

Owen Littlejohns

Transformation Train System Architect, NASA EED-3 / INNOVIM

Danny Kaufman

TEMPO Lead Data Scientist, NASA ASDC / Booz Allen Hamilton

Chris Battisto

Max Jones

Cloud Engineer, Development Seed

Tuesday July 28, 2026 4:00pm - 5:30pm CDT
Location TBA

Cloud-Native & Data Infrastructure

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4:00pm CDT

Organising Hybrid Meetings: Making Them Worthwhile Rather Than Striving for Perfect

Tuesday July 28, 2026 4:00pm - 5:30pm CDT

Location TBA

Sign-in & Notes

Hybrid meetings became common after COVID-19 lockdowns lifted, but many conferences have returned to fully in-person formats, which reduces inclusivity. Travel costs are particularly high for those from the Global South, and many people face restrictions such as caring responsibilities or health issues. This session works with participants to develop: (1) a toolbox of approaches and techniques that work well in hybrid meetings; and (2) a structured list of approaches to a good hybrid meeting covering technology, facilitation, and logistics. Includes a short talk from an EGU representative on how EGU makes hybrid meetings work.

Audience
Anyone looking for approaches to make conferences and events more accessible, participatory, and inclusive — both as organisers and as participants

Speakers

Lesley Wyborn

Data Strategist, Australian Research Data Commons

Jens Klump

Group Leader Exploration, CSIRO

“The really exciting part is not about putting labels on things, but about what you can do when you put machine learning to work on the labelled data.” (https://www.auscope.org.au/posts/2020/12/18/introducing-jens).
President of the International Geo Sample Number Implementati... Read More →

Stefanie Kethers

Program Manager (Data Challenges), ARDC

Tuesday July 28, 2026 4:00pm - 5:30pm CDT
Location TBA

Community, Education, & Capacity Building

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4:00pm CDT

Bridging Divides Through Data Rescue: Best Practices for Rescuing Long-Term Datasets

Tuesday July 28, 2026 4:00pm - 5:30pm CDT

Location TBA

Sign-in & Notes

Data rescue is the ultimate bridge between the scientific past, present, and future. It connects legacy records and multiple formats with AI/ML for digitization and cloud storage to serve a broader community needing long-term baseline data. This session covers data rescue relevant to any sector, with examples from earth sciences including natural systems and applied contexts (forestry, agriculture). It covers triaging which data to focus on first, working through examples, and discussing current challenges. Participants are encouraged to bring data examples they want help troubleshooting.

Audience
Scientists learning to integrate historical datasets into modern longitudinal studies; data stewards and archivists seeking new tools; tech developers identifying pain points in the rescue pipeline; students and educators

Speakers

Laura Super

Sherry Sun

Tuesday July 28, 2026 4:00pm - 5:30pm CDT
Location TBA

Data Stewardship, Governance, & Resilience

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4:00pm CDT

The ESDIS Metadata and Data Quality Drive

Tuesday July 28, 2026 4:00pm - 5:30pm CDT

Location TBA

Sign-in & Notes

This session puts forward the case that high quality metadata leads to better tools and services, and that standardized data leads to less costly tools and services. The session tests two hypotheses: (1) improving metadata quality will improve the quality of tools and services; and (2) improving standardization of incoming data will reduce the cost of ingest, archive, and distribution. Improvements being tested include bringing UMM-C inventory in line with schema validation rules, turning on CMR schema validation, establishing CMR as single point of truth for ESDIS metadata, and iterative AI/ML-powered improvement of collection metadata. The session measures reduction of issues reported against Earthdata Search.

Audience
Data providers, data curators, research scientists

Speakers