Dr. Jessica Scheick has been a pioneer in implementing open-source software practices and community building. Jessica, lead of the icepyx software project, conceived icepyx to overcome a significant barrier to access for scientists seeking to use NASA’s laser altimetry archive. Although the data are freely provided by NASA, data access needed streamlining and simplifying, so that researchers were not bogged down by coding required to simply find and read these data at scale. Jessica’s leadership of icepyx has resulted in greatly simplified querying, obtaining, analyzing and manipulating laser altimetry datasets, allowing researchers to quickly start analyzing data. In the process of leading icepyx, Jessica has made impactful contributions to other open science efforts benefiting many Earth science research communities.

The icepyx software has had a major impact on the laser altimetry community. Since the release of icepyx, over 1/4 of all NASA laser altimetry data downloads from the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) have used icepyx for access. Icepyx has also changed the tempo of Hackweek projects; in 2019 it took users a week to understand how to access data and simply plot them. By 2022, Jessica’s leadership of icepyx significantly minimized the time for Hackweek students to query and obtain data, and participants were doing actual data analysis over their region of interest within a matter of days. By reducing this barrier to entry, icepyx enables students in remote sensing classes to do projects with real data and new graduate students with little coding experience to be brought into altimetry groups and become productive quickly.

From inception, Jessica intentionally designed icepyx to be domain agnostic, working across many different datasets. Icepyx supports data products spanning many Earth science domains, including land and sea ice, ocean bathymetry, vegetation, lakes, and clouds. Icepyx has even been considered by archaeology teams to identify and characterize sites. This support of a broad swath of Earth science disciplines has allowed a large community of practice to form around icepyx, and Jessica’s leadership has nurtured that community.

Beyond icepyx, Jessica has contributed to other widely used Python libraries, specifically focusing on improving access, usability and reducing the learning curve for contributions. Through her work on icepyx, Jessica laid groundwork for other open science efforts (e.g., earthaccess Python library, SlideRule Earth web service, CryoCloud). Her work has had a major impact across the Earth science research community, and she has blazed a trail in the adoption of open science practices.

—Denis Felikson
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
Greenbelt, Maryland

—Robert Hawley
Dartmouth College
Hanover, New Hampshire