These are the NASA Goddard Earth Sciences Data and Information Services Center (GES DISC) Top Ten Highlights of 2023.

#1: In 2023, the GES DISC was selected as the lead NASA data center for the Atmosphere Observing System, an element of NASA’s next major Earth observation project, the Earth System Observatory.

#2: As part of NASA’s open science initiative to migrate data to the cloud, the NASA GES DISC achieved the migration of nearly onehalf of its total data archive to the cloud, approximately 2700 Terabytes of data.

#3: Several notable mission milestones occurred in 2023. The Orbiting Carbon Observatory 2, OCO2, began its tenth year of precise measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide. The Aura mission reached its one hundred thousandth orbit. Data from OCO2 and three of the four instruments on Aura are archived at the GES DISC, which celebrated its 30th anniversary of operations in 2023.

#4 : The GES DISC released 25 new or reprocessed datasets in 2023, including the Annual Summary of Artificial Light at Night at the County and Census Tract level.

#:5 In May 2023, two launches by New Zealand’s Rocketlab of an Electron launch vehicle carried four satellites of the TimeResolved Observations of Precipitation structure and storm Intensity with a Constellation of Smallsats, the TROPICS mission, to space. The TROPICS satellites make repeated observations of tropical cyclone dynamics.

#6: Staff of the GES DISC published a paper in Data Science Journal describing the system used to track research publications which used GES DISC data, and to connect those publications to the datasets that were analyzed. Another paper by GES DISC staff, published in the American Geophysical Union news magazine Eos, discussed better ways to share Earth observation data.

#7: The wellknown and widelyused NASA Giovanni data visualization and analysis system, hosted by the GES DISC, was cited in 324 journal papers or book chapters in 2023—the most publications citing Giovanni in a single year. One of these papers compared modeled sulfur dioxide concentrations in the Modern Era Retrospective analysis for Research and Applications – 2, MERRA2, dataset to observations of sulfur dioxide concentrations made by the Tropospheric Monitoring Instrument, TROPOMI, during the volcanic eruption on La Palma island in the Canary Island.

#8: The GES DISC staff made presentations at several scientific meetings in 2023, including meetings of the American Geophysical Union, the European Geophysical Union, the Earth Science Information Partners, the Scientific Python Programming Group, the Asia Oceania Geosciences Society, the International Ocean Colour Coordinating Group, ESRI International, and the Health and Air Quality Applied Sciences Team.

#9: Several inperson and virtual webinars and workshops were led by the GES DISC, including an Earthdata webinar that discussed the use of precipitation data to analyze extreme precipitation events, including Hurricane Hillary.

#10: NASA's GES DISC and Goddard Space Flight Center experienced firsthand the effects of smoke from Canadian wildfires, triggered by unseasonal warm temperatures and dry conditions, as the smoke drifted south from Canada and over Maryland. Data from orbiting instruments and ground stations detected the elevated smoke aerosols overhead.