ESA leads endeavour to save Earth Science data

The amount of information being generated about our planet is increasing at an exponential rate, but it must be easily accessible in order to apply it to the global needs relating to the state of the Earth.

GENESI-DR (Ground European Network for Earth Science Interoperations - Digital Repositories), an ESA-led, European Commission (EC)-funded two-year project, is taking the lead in providing reliable, easy, long-term access to Earth Science data via the Internet.

"We shall soon be receiving petabytes of data about our planet from space, so data access will be a major logistical problem. The EC has funded GENESI-DR as a flagship project in Europe to help meet this challenge," said Prof. Alan O'Neill, Director of the National Centre for Earth Observation at the University of Reading.

GENESI-DR will allow scientists from different Earth Science disciplines located across Europe to locate, access, combine and integrate historical and fresh Earth-related data from space, airbourne and in-situ sensors archived in large distributed repositories.

Currently, information about the state of the Earth, relevant services, analysis results, applications and tools are accessible in a very scattered and uncoordinated way, often through individual initiatives from Earth Observation mission operators, scientific institutes dealing with ground measurements, service companies, data catalogues, etc.

A dedicated infrastructure providing transparent access to all this will support Earth Science communities by allowing them to easily and quickly derive objective information and share knowledge based on all environmentally sensitive domains.

The use of high-speed networks (GÉANT) and the experimentation of new technologies, like BitTorrent, will also contribute to better services for the Earth Science communities.

In order to reach its objectives, the GENESI-DR e-Infrastructure will be validated against user needs for accessing and sharing Earth Science data. Initially, four specific applications in the land, atmosphere and marine domains have been selected, including:

• Near real time orthorectification for agricultural crops monitoring

• Urban area mapping in support of emergency response

• Data assimilation in GlobModel, addressing major environmental and health issues in Europe, with a particular focus on air quality