Credits & gratitude
mud2dust runs on open data and open infrastructure that other people are paying to operate. Listed here in genuine gratitude — not boilerplate.
C-band synthetic aperture radar (SAR) constellation. Sentinel-1A (2014–) and Sentinel-1C (2024–) provide ~6-day repeat coverage at 10–40 m resolution, see-through-cloud day/night observations of every land surface on Earth.
ESA's Copernicus Programme provides Sentinel-1 data fully free and open under the Copernicus license. Without that policy, mud2dust would not exist as an open project.
Validated Level-2 Radiometric Terrain Corrected SAR Backscatter from Sentinel-1, gamma-nought (γ⁰), 30 m resolution, CEOS-ARD compliant. Replaces ad-hoc per-project RTC processing with a single authoritative product.
The OPERA team is paying the heavy compute cost of running RTC processing globally so every downstream project doesn't have to. mud2dust was originally designed assuming Indigo Ag's now-retired RTC bucket; OPERA picked up the mantle and made the project viable again.
NASA Earthdata Distributed Active Archive Center (DAAC) for SAR products: Sentinel-1, OPERA RTC, NISAR (forthcoming), historical SAR archives. Hosts data on AWS S3 in us-west-2.
ASF runs the storage, access, and authentication infrastructure that gates SAR data to the world. They could have built a paywall; they built EDL + free S3 reads instead.
NASA Earthdata DAAC for land-surface remote sensing: HLS (Harmonized Landsat-Sentinel), MODIS, ECOSTRESS, ASTER. Hosted on AWS Earthdata Cloud.
LP-DAAC's HLS product (Phase 2 input for mud2dust) does the cross-sensor harmonization that would otherwise be weeks of work per region. They publish it free.
Federated archive of NASA's Earth-observing data. The Earthdata Login (EDL) authentication service is the single sign-on for OPERA, HLS, SMAP, ECOSTRESS, GEDI, MODIS, GPM, and dozens more datasets.
Earthdata's commitment to free-and-open data is the load-bearing principle that lets small teams build serious science on top. The EDL flow is one signup that unlocks the entire NASA Earth-observation archive.
AWS pays the storage and same-region egress costs for petabytes of public scientific data — Sentinel-1, Landsat, NOAA, NASA EOSDIS, OPERA, NEXRAD, GOES, HRRR, SMAP, and more. Without same-region S3 reads, every download would route through paid egress.
This program is the single biggest reason mud2dust is buildable for the price of a coffee subscription. AWS is paying real money to host public data so people can build on it; they get nothing direct back. Genuine thanks to the team behind that policy and to the contributors at NASA/ESA/USGS/NOAA who push their data into the program every day.