Erika Marin-Spiotta, Gerald R. North, Karletta Chief, Kaveh Madani, and Martha Ellen Maiden were awarded the 2020 Ambassador Award at the AGU Fall Meeting Honors Ceremony, held virtually in December 2020. The award is for “outstanding contributions to one or more of the following areas: societal impact, service to the Earth and space community, scientific leadership, and promotion of talent/career pool.”
Few
individuals had as much of an impact as Martha Maiden in working across
organizational and national boundaries to ensure data availability in
support of so many AGU science areas. She not only took care of the
“bits and bytes,” but she brought a strong science focus to these
efforts, including leading the effort to provide preliminary data sets
to the community so they could “cut their teeth” on data sets based on
precursor instruments from NASA, NOAA, and the U.S. Geological Survey
(USGS). When the next-generation data became available in the late 1990s
and early 2000s from the major platforms of the Earth Observing System
(EOS), the community was fully prepared to use the new data.
Ms.
Maiden was an early advocate for not implementing planned charges for
NASA EOS data. Through her consistent efforts over about a decade, she
inspired NASA, NOAA, and USGS to drop charging for data and worked
internationally with Earth observation providers to show the merit of
free and open data. As a result, the usage of satellite data by the
research and applications communities increased enormously.
She
managed the implementation of the Earth Observing System Data and
Information System during a time of rapid change in the “data world,”
working tirelessly to be sure that the hardware and software systems
used were cost-effective. Ms. Maiden did more than oversee a data
system, however; she led efforts in the Earth science community to share
data and make their use as easy as possible. It’s worth emphasizing
that at the time, this was not everyone’s usual approach to Earth
science data, so her personal and organizational efforts were critical.
Ms. Maiden worked effectively and creatively through entities such as
the Committee on Earth Observation Satellites and the Earth Science
Information Partners (ESIP) Federation. In fact, her role in nurturing
ESIP during its infancy led ESIP to create the Martha Maiden Award in
her honor.
Since
her retirement, Ms. Maiden continues to demonstrate her commitment to
the community. She has served on the AGU Fellows Committee for Earth and
Space Science Informatics since 2017, and she has been a reviewer for
the AGU/NASA Data Visualization Awards since their inception in 2017.
In
summary, Ms. Maiden’s long history and continuing efforts to serve the
AGU community by helping to “bring data to the people” make her highly
deserving of the AGU Ambassador Award.
—Jack Kaye, NASA, Washington, D.C.I
am so honored to receive this award. I am amazed to find myself in such
distinguished and elite company. What an unexpected cap to my career,
which was so very fulfilling. I was a supporting player in Earth
science, enabling my colleagues to maximize research and engineering
accomplishments in Earth science. I am proud to have played a part in
making data more available and usable. The Ambassador Award is unique in
providing an award for the larger recognition of the role that members
play in service to the Earth and space community. My motivation for
pressing for free data came from listening to users, whose studies were
stifled by the limited amount of data they were able to obtain when
having to include data costs in grant proposals. Without free and open
data sharing, important large regional and global studies, including
multiyear studies, would not have been possible.
In
graduate school, I studied radio astrophysics. When I got married, I
left with an M.S. and took a job working in Earth science, writing
scientific software for a microwave atmospheric sounding instrument. It
was a stroke of luck in my meandering career because I found Earth
science so rewarding and relevant—it’s where we live! The reality of
global climate change made it obvious that it was urgent Earth science
make
fast progress in understanding how the planet was changing. When I came
to NASA Headquarters and had a chance to influence data policy, it was
this urgency that was behind every decision I made.
Earth
and space science informatics is a relatively new discipline within
AGU. I am encouraged that AGU has highlighted and promoted best
practices in open and FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, and
reusable) data on a large scale in recent years across all disciplines.
—Martha Maiden, NASA,retired, Washington, D.C.
