Assessing NASA's Earth Science Metadata Quality: ARC and pyQuARC

As of writing this description (November 2024), NASA's Earthdata Search holds nearly 10,000 data collections, consisting of several decades-worth of Earth Observation (EO) information. In order for users to find the data they need, it is important to ensure that the metadata is correct and as expansive as possible. Correct and complete metadata is also important because incomplete or inaccurate metadata could discourage users from accessing or using the associated data. To help ensure that EO metadata meets certain standards (which also ultimately furthers open science efforts), NASA established the Analysis and Review of CMR (ARC) project. ARC and NASA ESDIS (Earth Observing System Data and Information System) collaborated to create a metadata framework, which established a set of requirements and best-practices for EO metadata. ARC conducts manual assessments of collections and granules within Earthdata Search using the framework, and has also created an open-source tool called pyQuARC to help automate ARC's process as much as possible. This brief presentation gives a glimpse into ARC and pyQuARC's process, and also shows the positive impact of both efforts so far.