PACE Hack Week: a successful event at UMBC!

From August 4 - 8, 2024, PACE Hack Week was held at UMBC in the ILSB, with 41 participants (from 89 applicants). Ten people traveled from abroad, and six were associated with NOAA. Per Jeremy Werdell (616/GSFC), "A group of early adopters were launched into rapid exploration of data products from the PACE observatory just 178 days into its mission. The event was supported by an award from the Ocean Carbon and Biogeochemistry (OCB) Program at WHOI (funded by NSF, NASA, and others)."

In addition to participation from GESTAR II's Ian Carroll (616/UMBC), Ivona Cetinic (616/MSU), Andy Sayer (616/UMBC), Susanne Craig (616/UMBC), Sean Foley (616/MSU), and James Allen (616/MSU), local support and participation included Pengwang Zhai, a guest lecture from Lorraine Remer, and tutorial prep by Meng Gao (616/SSAI).

Dr. Werdell (616/GSFC), Project Scientist for PACE, explains "The overarching goal was to accelerate (and continue democratizing) the use of PACE data (along with any other observatory), with a focus on Jupyter notebooks and cloud data access from a cloud computing environment. The desired outcome was a series of usable workflows to be hosted publicly online, plus a series of recorded tutorials. The website for the event has all our Jupyter notebooks and lectures, and recordings will be posted once videos are edited. Participants self-organized into nine group projects related to the use of PACE data to explore a science question."

He added that "The mornings proceeded as 1) projects’ rose/thorn/bud reporting, 2) a 45-minute science lecture, and 3) two hours of project time. The afternoons included 1) a pair of one-hour “coding” tutorials and 2) two hours of project time." Each evening included a social event: a Bob Ross painting night, a “fireside chat” with two generous NASA HQ Program Managers, a blue crab picnic at Patapsco State Park, a “nerd nite”/talent show, and a PACE trivia night.

Congratulations to all of the organizers, hosts, researchers, and participants on a successful event. Gratitude was also expressed for UMBC and Flat Tuesdays for being a terrific host site.