Single Source Determination_IDL 5.20.2025_Final_REDACTEDv2.pdf

Version 2.0

SINGLE SOURCE DETERMINATION USING

SIMPLIFIED ACQUISITION PROCEDURES (SAP)

FOR AN ACTION NOT EXCEEDING THE SIMPLIFIED ACQUISITION THRESHOLD

(AUTHORITY: FAR 13.106-1(b)(1))

RFQ #1332KP25Q0028

1. Agency and contracting activity. Department of Commerce, NOAA Acquisition and Grants Office (AGO), Satellite Information and Acquisition Division (SIAD) and National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS), Center for Satellite Applications and Research (STAR).

2. Description of supplies or services required to meet agency needs (including the estimated value).

IDL is a scientific programming language used by NESDIS in support of its mission. It enables users to visualize many different types of complex data in order to provide a better understanding of the data.

Mission Science Requirements

a. An easily useable, compact platform/environment for development coding and visualization.

b. A product to support ABI (Advanced Baseline Imager) calibration and validation.

c. A backbone language for the interactive multisensor snow and ice mapping system (IMS), all SAR (Satellite Aperture Radar) imagery and applications, and the Hazards Mapping System (HMS).

d. Program tools to conduct the analyses and studies necessary for ozone product validation, monitoring, trouble-shooting and development.

e. A product for rapid visualization of scientific outputs, including global maps of more than 30 MiRS (Microwave Integrated Retrieval System) retrieval and derived products, as well as validation maps and statistics to determine if products meet accuracy and precision requirements.

f. A product for off line computations, for example eigenanalysis to generate EOFs (Emperical Orthogonal Function).

g. A product to generate high quality images and conduct data analysis in daily Calibration/Validation activity.

h. A product to generate ICVS (Integrated Calibration/Validation System) images in near real time.

i. A product to support calibration/validation and further development of ocean color products from VIIRS (Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite) on SNPP (Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership) and NOAA-20, as well as some other sensors such as OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat-8 and the Ocean and OLCI (Ocean and Land Colour Instrument) on Sentinel-3A/B.

j. A product to provide Coral Reef Watch products and services to the coral reef community.

k. A product to provide a quick and convenient tool for land product development, validation and monitoring.

l. A product to produce global daily images of all JPSS (Joint Polar Satellite System) related

EDRs (Environmental Data Record) at multiple zoom levels.

How IDL meets these requirements

a. IDL is effectively based on FORTRAN, a primary programming language used in NESDIS.

RFQ#1332KP25Q0028

b. IDL has significant libraries for coded functions.

c. IDL is used to process, graphically display, and analyze mission critical products.

d. The backbone of some NESDIS monitoring and validation is a semi-automated system of

IDL codes that creates hundreds of new figures and summary statistics each month.

e. IDL creates the overpass data sets used in the validation comparisons with ground-based assets.

f. IDL facilitates readers and tools for all ozone products that allow interactive exploration of new anomalies or confirm performance as the measurements' behavior changes over time.

g. IDL provides a user-friendly programming interface to allow rapid creation of new software tools and maintenance of existing software tools. Graphics are generally produced quickly and well-integrated within the MiRS data processing flow.

h. IDL provides for code testing and debugging using the IDL command line environment. It also allows the use of third-party external libraries to realize advanced data analysis/image generation functions.

i. IDL is used for analyzing and imaging results of satellite data processing, and for doing quick simulation and testing of processing procedures before implementing in Fortran or C++.

j. IDL facilitates development of a desktop application, OCDAPS (Ocean Color Data Analysis and Processing System), for ocean color data analysis and visualization. The application has various modules including input, process, and data manipulations etc. With IDL, OCDAPS has the capability to read various formats, including NetCDF, NetCDF4, HDF, HDF5 and standard binary format, and it can also process ocean color data from SDR (Sensor Data Record) to EDR, EDR to Level 3 and merging Level 3 products. With the IDL's mapping function, OCDAPS can also map SDR, EDR and Level 3 data to various map projections. Based on IDL, OCDAPS can visualize SDR, EDR and Level3 data including data quality flags, with very convenient adjustment of the color bar and color scales.

k. IDL facilitates daily work on VIIRS Cal/Val.

l. IDL can be used for batch processing when thousands of granules of data need to be processed, and the performance is good.

m. IDL facilitates almost all data processing, product producing, and data analysis, for Coral

Reef Watch.

n. IDL facilitates the processing of raw data from SCDR (STAR Central Data Repository) and creation of large arrays that are saved as PNG files. IDL is also used for tiling larger images.

NESDIS has a resulting requirement for the continued use of IDL. The current contract which provides IDL licenses and maintenance expired April 30, 2025.

Technical Specifications:

a. Contractor shall provide NV5 Geospatial Solutions’ Interactive Data Language (IDL) licenses for NESDIS.

b. Contractor shall provide software maintenance for each license, including all new versions, patches, and security fixes.

c. Each IDL license may be deployed on any supported platform and operating system.

d. Each IDL license may be either node-locked, user-locked, or floating, as supported by the target platform and operating system.

e. Each IDL license may be deployed on infrastructure either on premise at NESDIS, or in

NESDIS commercial cloud environment.

RFQ#1332KP25Q0028

Unique or highly specialized capabilities of IDL include:

a. IDL has functions designed for imagery manipulation, processing, with customized GUI interfaces. Any alteration in the current code would need years of co-production with IDL and a new language to prevent mission critical failures in NESDIS products.

b. IDL has done a very good job of keeping their libraries manipulating the required file output formats for NDE, NetCDF, as well as the required IDPS output format, HDF, up to date.

They also pay good attention to backward compatibility as they add new features and support their product on different operating systems. Programs created in IDL can interface with other code packages and scripts used in our systems, e.g., Fortran and BASH.

c. Some Python users find that the instability from updates and long run times of Python are negatives. One example was that a mapping package they relied on was removed because it became commercial, and was not found in later versions. They were left trying to write code to duplicate its capabilities.

d. Capabilities provided by IDL are present in Matlab. However, it is unclear if these capabilities are completely duplicated in Python (e.g. Eigen analysis).

e. Some functions are not provided in Matlab.

f. IDL is more convenient than other products to open current remote sensing data formats such as HDF5 and NetCDF. Much re-usable code has been developed in IDL.

g. Some NESDIS tests have determined that Python is relatively slow at creating large imagery files, such as full resolution for some VIIRS.

h. IDL handles both the processing and visualization requirements in one package.

5. Market Research.

Other products which might meet the requirements are Python, Fortran, C, and C++, for the processing requirements, plus Mathworks’ Matlab for the visualization requirements. However, NESDIS has invested many person-years developing processes which utilize the IDL scientific programming language because of its data processing and visualization capabilities. NESDIS estimates that it would take at least 65,520 person-hours (31.5 person-years), to migrate current IDL code and processes to another product or products. At an estimated average cost of $100/person-hour, this cost would be over $6.5M, not including the loss of scientific advancement as personnel spend time on re-programming instead of development. Calendar time of the migration would depend on how many developers could work in parallel, and be funded in parallel, to perform that 31.5 person-years of work.

With a planned NESDIS migration from on-premise IT infrastructure, to commercial cloud computing, and the inherent re-working of processes which that brings, especially while utilizing the myriad of cloud services available, NESDIS may be able to migrate from IDL to cloud-based services which can adequately, at least partially, replace the functions which IDL delivers, thus reducing or eliminating the dependency on IDL, by the time a follow-on to this contract is necessary.

Market Research Report included in contract files

6. Technical/Requirements Representative Certification

I certify that this requirement constitutes the Government’s minimum needs and the supporting data provided herein is accurate and complete to the best of my knowledge and belief.