Dr. Brian Killough (NASA) presenting on the CEOS ODC “Road to 20” Vision for seeing 20 national-scale data cubes in use and effective by the year 2020.
During the last week of July, 2017, CEOS participated in the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society (IGARSS) Symposium in Fort Worth, Texas. This 37th Annual Symposium of the Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society (GRSS) was themed “International Cooperation for Global Awareness”, which emphasized the need for scientific communities to work together to address many of today’s challenges. With over 2,000 attendees from around the globe, IGARSS is a top-notch international conference.
This year at IGARSS, the CEOS Systems Engineering Office delivered its first-ever, interactive technical workshop on the CEOS Open Data Cube (ODC). The ODC is designed to help people use open source technologies to exploit large volumes of satellite data for global applications — “A New Way to Manage Satellite Data Using an Open Source Platform.” This free, half-day workshop provided more than 25 students, researchers, and professionals from various countries with a hands-on introduction to the ODC.
Syed R Rizvi introducing the interactive tutorials.
Based on the Australian Geoscience Data Cube, the CEOS ODC is an open source software architecture that allows satellite data pixels to be spatially and temporally aligned in “cubes” to take advantage of modern computing. Workshop attendees participated in several interactive tutorials illustrating how easily the ODC facilitates time series analyses (e.g. for agriculture, water, forests, disasters), the use of diverse datasets with interoperable methods, and connections to common GIS tools (free or commercial). They learned how to prepare data, create a data cube, perform time series analyses, and work with a water detection application.
At the end of the workshop, the participants applauded the presenters and agreed that the CEOS ODC has great potential to streamline data distribution and management for providers and reduce technical barriers for users — increasing the impacts of Earth observation satellite data on solving our world’s problems.
Interested in learning more about our ODC efforts and trainings? Please visit the ODC Website — a one-stop portal, specially designed to help our international partners and customers get the cutting-edge open source code, real case studies, getting started guides, interactive tutorials, presentation videos, and other resources related to the ODC.