Abstract
Abstract. Earth observation is entering a new era where the increasing availability of free and open global satellite data sets combined with the computing power offered by modern information technologies opens up the possibility to process high-resolution data sets at global scale and short repeat intervals in a fully automatic fashion. This will not only boost the availability of higher level earth observation data in purely quantitative terms, but can also be expected to trigger a step change in the quality and usability of earth observation data. However, the technical, scientific, and organisational challenges that need to be overcome to arrive at this point are significant. First of all, Petabyte-scale data centres are needed for storing and processing complete satellite data records. Second, innovative processing chains that allow fully automatic processing of the satellite data from the raw sensor records to higher-level geophysical products need to be developed. Last but not least, new models of cooperation between public and private actors need to be found in order to live up to the first two challenges. This paper offers a discussion of how the Earth Observation Data Centre for Water Resources Monitoring (EODC) – a catalyser for an open and international cooperation of public and private organisations – will address these three grand challenges with the aim to foster the use of earth observation for monitoring of global water resources.
Highlights
The scientific exploitation of earth observation (EO) data is becoming increasingly challenging for several reasons
Recognising the needs for building strategic partnerships in EO science and applications, a group of public and private European organisations has developed a cooperation model – presented here for the first time in the scientific literature – that shall ensure that the above discussed grand challenges in EO can be addressed. This cooperation model is built around the insight that exponentially growing data volumes and the increasing complexity of the scientific algorithms demand a fundamental change in the way of how EO data are distributed and processed
These pilot projects have demonstrated that novel information technology (IT) technologies, including virtualisation, cloud computing, parallelisation, are making it technically feasible to change the current paradigm in EO data distribution and processing
Summary
The scientific exploitation of earth observation (EO) data is becoming increasingly challenging for several reasons. The increasing specialisation and cooperation of the EO science community has already led to remarkable advances in the provision of high-quality scientific EO data sets Many of these developments stand on shaky grounds given that the scientific and technical know-how and data processing capabilities remain largely fragmented. Recognising the needs for building strategic partnerships in EO science and applications, a group of public and private European organisations has developed a cooperation model – presented here for the first time in the scientific literature – that shall ensure that the above discussed grand challenges in EO can be addressed This cooperation model is built around the insight that exponentially growing data volumes and the increasing complexity of the scientific algorithms demand a fundamental change in the way of how EO data are distributed and processed.
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