NASA has announced a partnership with Amazon Web Services that the agency hopes will spark wider collaboration on climate research. In an effort that is in some ways parallel to Google's Earth Engine, NASA has uploaded terabytes of data to Amazon's public cloud and made it available to the anyone.

Three data sets are already up at Amazon. The first is climate change forecast data for the continental United States from NASA Earth Exchange (NEX) climate simulations, scaled down to make them usable outside of a supercomputing environment. The other two are satellite data sets—one from from the US Geological Survey's Landsat, and the other a collection of Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) data from NASA's Terra and Aqua Earth remote sensing satellites.

Rama Nemani, NASA's principal scientist for the NEX project at Ames Research Center, said in an agency statement on the project, "We are excited to grow an ecosystem of researchers and developers who can help us solve important environmental research problems. Our goal is that people can easily gain access to and use a multitude of data analysis services quickly through AWS to add knowledge and open source tools for others' benefit."

Both the MODIS data and Landsat images are also part of Google's Earth Engine project. However, Google is currently only providing programmatic access to those data sets to a limited number of research partners. The AWS data sets will allow a broader range of students and researchers to access the data and use the sets with their own applications.