Name: Closing the ARCO Adoption Gap: Modernizing Data Analysis Workflows
Start: 2026-07-29T08:30:00-0500
End: 2026-07-29T10:00:00-0500

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.

Closing the ARCO Adoption Gap: Modernizing Data Analysis Workflows

Wednesday July 29, 2026 8:30am - 10:00am CDT

Comal

Collaborative Notes

Despite the growing availability of Analysis-Ready, Cloud-Optimized (ARCO) data, most of the Earth System Science community still relies on legacy download-and-analyze workflows. This session brings together data providers, software developers, and users to compare notes on what is actually moving the needle on adoption, with focus on interoperability across ARCO datasets from different providers. It also discusses the rapidly expanding role of LLM-assisted data discovery and analysis, including emerging tooling such as MCP servers. Through lightning talks, demonstrations, and guided discussion, the session will surface pain points and collaboratively draft a lightweight ARCO Adoption Notes document.

Speakers
1. What drives ARCO adoption? Lessons from NSF NCAR's GDEX, Speaker: Harsha Hampapura
2. Beautiful, Barrier-Free Visualization as an Incentive for ARCO Adoption, Speaker: Elizabeth Holmes
3. From Files to Analysis: Chunking, Virtualization, and ARCO-like Access Patterns in the Cloud, Speaker: Luis Lopez

Audience
Open data providers (NASA, NOAA, DOE, NSF NCAR, USGS, university data centers); tool and cyberinfrastructure developers; Earth science researchers and domain scientists including graduate students and early-career researchers

Speakers

Eli Holmes

NMFS Open Science lead, NOAA Fisheries

I have been involved in training in statistics and ocean data computing for most of my career. I am currently lead of NMFS Open Science and in this role, I facilitate and run trainings in computing, data access and statistics for NOAA Fisheries. I am co-lead of the Inter-agency... Read More →

Luis Lopez

Research Software Engineer, NSIDC

Luis Lopez is a Research Software Engineer at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colorado. He is a passionate advocate of open science and has contributed to open source projects such as Apache Nutch, PyLDAVis, earthaccess and virtualizarr.