Science Access to Commercial EO Data 2

– This paper will present the data policy and programmes/mecanismes for

gaining free or low cost access to data from JAXA’s ALOS and ALOS-2 for

science use.

The Advanced Land Observing Satellite-2 (ALOS-2) is a follow-on mission from the ALOS. Aims of the mission are

1) Disaster monitoring of damage areas, both in considerable detail, and when these areas may be large

2) Continuous updating of data archives related to national land and infrastructure information

3) Effective monitoring of cultivated areas

4) Global monitoring of tropical rain forests to identify carbon sinks.

L-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (PALSAR-2) aboard ALOS-2 is capable of observing day and night, and in all weather conditions.The ALOS-2 was launched by the H-IIA Launch Vehicle on May 24, 2014.

For the data provision, JAXA published a data policy for using ALOS-2.

In this paper, focused on the science use, the policy and mechanism will be described. Also together with similar papers that are proposed by the European Space Agency, ESA, the Italian Space Agency, ASI, the Canadian Space Agency, CSA, the German Space Agency, DLR, will be provide a broad view during one single coordinated session of how to access various types of commercial satellite imagery for science applications.

The ESA Earth Observation Ground Segment evolution strategy has three features. The presentation will focus essentially on the first feature, labelled as EO Innovation Europe which aims at a “non-monolithic” approach toward EO data/information generation and management. This approach should lead to a sustainable network of interoperable Earth Observation Exploitation Platforms, which are based on coordinating expertise spread over Europe and on reliable governance principles. The ambition is an increased integration of EO data/information for a much broader use for scientific, social and economic purposes as well as for the generation of new commercial applications and services. The presentation will provide an overview of the on-going concrete initiatives and pilot projects leading to the implementation of the strategy, in coordination with ESA Member States, European Commission and Industry.

The Centre for Environmental Archival (CEDA) delivers long term curation of scientifically important climate and Earth Observation data and facilitates the use of data by the UK and European environmental science community. The archive also includes data from the Sentinel and METOP series of satellites, ATSR1/2 and ENVISAT as well as airborne and in-situ datasets and derived products. Well over 3 petabytes of data are now available from CEDA’s archives and this will rise considerably in the next 12 months as data arrives from the Sentinel satellites and the CMIP6 (the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project, Phase 6).

To support the analysis and processing of high-volume data, the unique, multi-petabyte, super-data-cluster “JASMIN” has been deployed. JASMIN (and its services to support Earth Observation via CEMS, Climate and Environmental Monitoring from Space) incorporates over 17 PB fast storage and is co-located with data analysis computing facilities for batch, hosted and cloud computing.

CEDA are partners in the UK Collaborative Ground Segment for Copernicus, collaborating with the Satellite Applications Catapult and Airbus-DS in Farnborough to ensure Sentinel data access for UK users in academia, government and the private sector. CEDA is routinely downloading Sentinel products from ESA’s rolling archive and makes them available for download or direct access on the JASMIN system. CEDA will hold at least 6 months of data for immediate access to users (equating to over 250TB for Sentinel1) with older data held near line on a dedicated tape facility. Users will be able to quickly request data held in this facility and the restored data will be made available in their own dedicated JASMIN Group Workspace (GWS) for a limited time. Once Sentinel 3 is operational CEDA expects to be retrieving up to 10Tb per day. It is expected that most UK science users will access, process and analyse the data in the JASMIN-CEMS hosted environment avoiding the need to download and store data on their local machines. CEDA is also actively engaged in plans for the archival and dissemination of climate simulation data internationally through the Earth System Grid Federation for CMIP6 (Coupled Model Intercomparison Project, Phase 6) data. CMIP6 will produce tens of PB of climate model simulations, the availability of which, alongside satellite observations will provide a rich source of data for climate and other environmental scientists. JASMIN and CEDA’s combination of EO and Climate Data holdings, data access and analysis tools and specialised hardware are already being used to support the development of climate services.

The Intergovernmental Group on Earth Observations (GEO) created a Task Force to define a common set Data Management Principles for the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS). The Task Force, through representation and consultation with many institutions and initiatives around the globe, agreed to a set of ten principles that address the need for discoverability, accessibility, usability, preservation, and curation of the resources made available through GEOSS.

Through a consensus process that engaged additional stakeholders and experts the Task Force also drafted a set of Implementation Guidelines that data providers and others can use as they seek to implement the principles. The Guidelines will also provide a basis for assessing how well the principles are being adhered to in practice. The Guidelines provide, for each Data Management Principle: 1) The terms used to describe the principle and its implementation; 2) An explanation of the principle; 3. Guidance on implementation, with examples; 4) Metrics to measure the level of adherence to the principle; and 5) Resource implications of implementing the principle.

In this presentation the Principles and the Guidelines will be described, along with the process that was employed to arrive at them. The relationship to the GEO Data Sharing Principles will also be discussed. The Data Management Principles have been incorporated into the GEO Strategic Plan for 2016-2025, and the draft Implementation Guidelines are currently under review.

NASA’s Earth Science Data Systems (ESDS) is a system of systems enabling the coordination and sharing of scientific research and data across the Earth Science community.  NASA’s ESDS enable research, algorithm development and testing, and data discovery and access. NASA’s Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS) is a multi-petabyte-scale archive of environmental data that supports global climate change research by providing end-to-end services from NASA’s Earth Observing System (EOS) instrument data collection to science data processing to full access to EOS and other earth science data. On a daily basis, the EOSDIS ingests, processes, archives and distributes over 3 terabytes of data from NASA’s Earth Science missions representing over 3500 data products ranging from various types of science disciplines. EOSDIS is currently comprised of 12 discipline specific data centers that are collocated with centers of science discipline expertise. EOSDIS has continually evolved to improve the discoverability, accessibility, and usability of high-impact NASA data spanning the multi-petabyte-scale archive of Earth science data products.

NASA has recently deployed several major services under the ESDS umbrella of capabilities including a single, shared, scalable Earth Science Metadata repository (CMR), a high performance imagery service (GIBS), ESDS wide identity management (Earthdata Login), metadata authoring and management solutions, and multiple instances of standards compliant data access services (Hyrax and THREDDS OPeNDAP Servers).  Layered on top of these core services are high performance, open-sourced end-user access tools such as NASA’s WorldView and the Earthdata Search Client.  By taking advantage of these operational and highly scalable NASA services, the barrier of entry to produce high value offerings to end-users was dramatically lowered.  To expand on this model, NASA is looking at how to design, build, and deploy core services that encourage and accelerate affordable discipline specific capabilities.

Competitive programs, such as NASA’s ACCESS program, produce innovative capabilities that can provide significant value to the broader community; however the gap between a successful prototype project and a fully operational and sustainable community service can be prohibitively expensive for some efforts.  NASA is undertaking a major effort to align its ESDS core systems to cost effectively integrate community efforts.  In addition to providing high performance data catalog search and imagery services, NASA is leveraging cloud technologies to explore a full service application hosting platform (NGAP), enabling community efforts to meet operational demands such as scalability, security, and fault tolerance with minimal effort.  This presentation discusses lessons learned from designing and developing shared, scalable enterprise services, encouraging community adoption of those services, and what capabilities NASA currently offers and is exploring for future development.