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Terradue & EGI: a partnership for Earth Observation

(May 2017) Pedro Gonçalves on how EGI’s Federated Cloud supports Terradue’s operations for the Geohazards Exploitation Platform.

Earth observations from satellites produce vast amounts of data. In particular, the new Copernicus Sentinel missions are playing an increasingly important role as a reliable high-quality and free open data source for scientific, public sector and commercial activities.

ICT solutions can facilitate the handling of these large volumes of data and are nowadays modifying the expectations that organisations have on new service development and on support to Earth Observation (EO) data exploitation. Their goal is more and more to develop capacities to create added value, involving SLAs and accountability with business partners for the data products and services they bring in this process.

The Terradue Cloud Platform is addressing this topic with solutions to transfer EO processing algorithms to cloud infrastructures. The platform also provides services to optimise the connectivity of the data centres with more integrated discovery and processing methods. For example, Terradue provides the engineering and operational support for the Geohazards Exploitation Platform), an ESA-funded partnership also involving private companies (TRE-ALTAMIRA), research centres (CNR IREA, CNRS ENS, CNRS EOST and INGV) and space agency (DLR EOC).

GEP and EGI

GEP offers a rich set of ready to use EO data processing services for the analysis and monitoring of earthquake, volcanoes and landslides. The platform federates the geohazards community by creating a workplace with cloud-based models of collaboration, where data providers, users and technology providers join forces to produce scientific and commercial exploitable results.

EGI supports Terradue with matchmaking services between ICT consumers and the appropriate provider(s) across the EGI Federation and beyond. The computing and storage resources from the ReCaS Bari and BELNET-BEGRID centres are used by Terradue to help the global scale systematic production of the DLR InSAR Browse Medium-Resolution Service on the GEP. With this service, the platform produces interferograms to show where earthquakes are most likely to impact society.

Currently in a ramp-up phase, which began in September 2016 covering 20% of the world seismic mask, GEP is planned to reach its peak of 50% by the 2nd quarter of 2017 with a production rate of about 320 Sentinel-1 scenes (160 interferometric pairs) per day. This production is fully ran on EGI Federated Cloud resources .

The Service level agreements (SLAs) established with EGI Foundation enabled Terradue to extend the hybrid cloud infrastructure using a new OpenNebula OCCI driver, and provided a reliable Cloud infrastructure for the ESA Thematic Exploitation Platforms users.

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