24 Hour near real time processing and computation for the JPL Airborne Snow Observatory

JPL's Airborne Snow Observatory is an integrated imaging spectrometer and scanning LIDAR for measuring mountain snow albedo, snow depth/snow water equivalent, and ice height (once exposed). This paper describes the first year of the project's "Snow On" campaign where over a course of 3 months, ASO flew the Tuolumne River Basin, Sierra Nevada, California above the O'Shaughnessy Dam of the Hetch Hetchy reservoir; focusing initial on the Tuolumne, and then moved to weekly flights over the Uncompahgre Basin, Colorado. To meet the needs of its customers including Water Resource managers who are keenly interested in Snow melt, the ASO team had to develop and end to end 24 hour latency capability for processing spectrometer and LIDAR data from Level 0 to Level 4 products. This paper describes the Big data processing architecture and data system for ASO.