Earth Observation Data Cubes

Download or read book Earth Observation Data Cubes written by Gregory Giuliani and published by MDPI. This book was released on 2020-03-16 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Satellite Earth observation (EO) data have already exceeded the petabyte scale and are increasingly freely and openly available from different data providers. This poses a number of issues in terms of volume (e.g., data volumes have increased 10× in the last 5 years); velocity (e.g., Sentinel-2 is capturing a new image of any given place every 5 days); and variety (e.g., different types of sensors, spatial/spectral resolutions). Traditional approaches to the acquisition, management, distribution, and analysis of EO data have limitations (e.g., data size, heterogeneity, and complexity) that impede their true information potential to be realized. Addressing these big data challenges requires a change of paradigm and a move away from local processing and data distribution methods to lower the barriers caused by data size and related complications in data management. To tackle these issues, EO data cubes (EODC) are a new paradigm revolutionizing the way users can store, organize, manage, and analyze EO data. This Special Issue is consequently aiming to cover the most recent advances in EODC developments and implementations to broaden the use of EO data to larger communities of users, support decision-makers with timely and actionable information converted into meaningful geophysical variables, and ultimately unlock the information power of EO data.