A beta version of the VEDA dashboard has been released at https://www.earthdata.nasa.gov/dashboard/. The dashboard provides an interactive storytelling platform for scientists to describe the science research and data products. Dashboard is one of the components of the VEDA platform which is building an ecosystem of tools for science data on the cloud for analysis, processing, and visualization. Currently, the dashboard is composed of science thematic areas (agriculture, air quality, biomass, ocean/water quality), Earth Information System (EIS) topics (freshwater, fire, sea level change, and greenhouse gas center), environmental justice, and COVID-19. One of the highlights of this release is the environmental justice story on disaster recovery in the aftermath of hurricanes Ida and Maria. The IMPACT data science team collaborated with the NASA HQ environmental justice leads to develop the story, applying machine learning techniques on high resolution Planet datasets to detect blue tarps to identify and quantify disaster recovery. Complementing satellite observation with socio-economic information, this environmental justice story demonstrates the considerable implications of being able to more quickly identify overlooked storm-damaged communities.
