2025 FOSS4G NA | Geophysics in the Cloud - Sophia Parafina
In this session from FOSS4G NA 2025, Sophia Parafina, a cloud advocate for the EarthScope Consortium, presents Geophysics in the Cloud. Sophia introduces the mission of EarthScope, a nonprofit organization funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) that provides the global scientific community with access to high-quality geophysical data—including seismic, GNSS, SAR, and magnetotelluric observations.
The presentation details EarthScope's massive "lift and shift" migration from legacy on-premise infrastructure to a cloud-native environment in AWS, managing over a petabyte of open data. Sophia showcases "GeoLab," a specialized JupyterHub environment that allows researchers to process large-scale geophysical datasets directly in the cloud using tools like Dask, PyTorch, and Apache Arrow. She also demonstrates real-world applications of geophysics, such as using GNSS reflectometry to measure snowpack and soil moisture with millimeter precision.
Highlights:
🛰️ What is EarthScope? An overview of the consortium’s role in providing open access to seismic and geodetic instrumentation and data
🔄 Migration to AWS: Breaking down decades of Fortran-based processing into modern AWS Lambdas and S3-based workflows
🧩 GeoLab & JupyterHub: A deep dive into the cloud-based research environment offering specialized containers for seismic and GNSS analysis
⚙️ Modern Data Formats: How EarthScope is moving toward Apache Arrow and TileDB to enable high-speed, zero-copy data engineering
🌐 Global Seismic Picking: A look at how researchers used EarthScope’s petabyte-scale data to build a global earthquake catalog using machine learning
🏢 Hazard Monitoring: Using seismometers and GNSS stations to track everything from hurricane-induced ocean vibrations to ionospheric disturbances caused by tsunamis
🏗️ GNSS Reflectometry: Explaining how satellite signal noise ratios are used to measure surface deformation, snowpack, and vegetation moisture
For more content like this check out www.projectgeospatial.com
#Geophysics #FOSS4G #CloudComputing #AWS #EarthScope #Seismology #GNSS #JupyterHub #DataScience #OpenSource #OpenData #ProjectGeospatial #Dask #MachineLearning #NaturalHazards
