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Heritage Missions satellites orbiting the EarthSatellites pictures ©ESA

The ESA Heritage Missions Virtual Lab launches on EarthConsole®

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A virtual space offering customized data processing services to harness the invaluable legacy left by the Heritage Missions, all accessible with a single sign-on: this is the ESA Heritage Missions Virtual Lab which has been officially launched today on the EarthConsole® platform powered by Progressive Systems.

The Heritage Missions consist of over 45 non-operational earth observation missions, including cornerstone ESA missions such as the European Remote Sensing satellites, ERS-1 and ERS-2, and ENVISAT. These missions acquired data from various optical, radar, and atmospheric instruments for over 40 years.

The preservation of data coming from these missions is of key importance for the ongoing environmental research on our planet. When combined with data from new satellites, Heritage Missions data provides a unique opportunity to look back in time and build long-term data series on a diverse range of applications such as climate change, sea levels, surface temperatures, melting ice, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, atmospheric composition, deforestation, urban mapping and much more.

The Lab has been established with exactly this mission in mind: to assist research centers and universities in gaining a deeper understanding of the evolution of Earth dynamics over time, by leveraging Heritage Missions data and related processors.

Our goal with EarthConsole® has always been to make it easier for users to access and utilize earth observation data. As we continue to expand and improve the platform, we remain committed to this objective. The new Heritage Missions Virtual Lab on EarthConsole® maintains the unique features of the platform, including the ability to co-locate data and the processing capacity. This reduces the impact on data transfer, and enables the completion of large-scale processing campaigns within the project’s specified time frame.

In addition, by entrusting the management of processing campaigns and IT infrastructure to our team of experts, researchers can focus entirely on their research goals without worrying about the technical activities.

We want to keep on providing researchers and scientists with the necessary support to achieve their research objectives on time and with minimal distractions.

Giancarlo Rivolta,
CEO at Progressive Systems

The Lab offers researchers and scientists a range of possibilities to process and analyze Heritage Missions data.

One of its key features is the Small Baseline Subset (SBAS) processor, provided by IREA, a scientific and technological research institute belonging to the largest Italian research institution, the National Research Council (CNR). The service generates soil deformation maps and time series from ERS and ENVISAT data. With this processor, users can choose to perform bulk processing campaigns (supervised by EarthConsole® experts) or on-demand processing tasks (independently managed by the user via the P-PRO ON DEMAND platform). Researchers can also receive expert support to integrate additional processors into the EarthConsole® high-performance computing environment.

The Lab also provides ready-to-use virtual machines for algorithm development, testing and post-processing analysis equipped with instant cloud data access, software for Heritage data analysis & visualization already installed and flexible computing resources and storage.

Last but not least with a view to supporting an open science approach, the Lab makes available a set of tools to network and share research results with colleagues, including a thematic forum, a repository of processed datasets, and a library with relevant publications and media for consultation.

If you plan to use the lab services for research, educational, or pre-commercial purposes, you may be eligible to submit a sponsorship request to the ESA Network of Resources. If your application will be successful, it would allow you to receive a voucher that may fully cover the costs of the services.

Interested researchers can register to the Lab by following the provided instructions to join and the forms available via the lab to request the services.

This is a project supported by the ESA Network of Resources initiative.

EarthConsole® selected as service provider for two OCRE funded research projects

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EarthConsole® by Progressive Systems was chosen as the preferred service provider for two research projects awarded through the OCRE (Open Clouds for Research Environments) call for funding Earth Observation services. These projects required extensive processing campaigns for different objectives using processors from the SARvatore (SAR Versatile Altimetric TOolkit for Research & Exploitation) family of processors. These processors were integrated by Progressive Systems into the ESA Altimetry Virtual Lab on the EarthConsole® platform in 2021, following the previous ten-year experience as RSS G-POD operator at the European Space Agency.

With this long-term processing heritage, EarthConsole® was the clear choice for the research institutions leading the projects.

The supported projects

Project: CryoSSARinSAM+
Research Institution: Technical University of Denmark – DTU SPACE (Denmark)

The Polar regions are important to study for a number of reasons. In an era of climate change, melting ice is expected to accelerate sea level change. In the past, various research groups have processed the first 9 years (2010.07-2020) of Cryosat radar altimetry for the Polar Oceans independently, using EarthConsole® or using the G-POD On Demand platform computing services. To continue this vital timeseries up through 2023 and also extend the Polar regions coverage to all regions outside the 50 degree parallel, this project was established.

CryoSSARinSAM+ aims at developing a common processing chain configuration to produce a single, open-access CryoSat-2 altimetry mission dataset that can support radar altimetry research of the polar oceans (both for the northern and southern hemisphere).

This dataset will have a wide range of potential applications, such as studying sea level, circulation, and trends in ice-covered polar seas; improving algorithms to monitor coastal sea level; estimating the thickness of summer sea ice; measuring significant wave height in polar oceans; and enhancing measurements of winter sea ice thickness in the Arctic and Antarctic, among other.

We want this dataset to become a reference standard for the radar altimetry research community, playing a pivotal role in advancing our knowledge of the polar oceans and ice cover, and the impact of climate change on them. A number of research institutions have been onboard designing this study and will directly ingest these data in their ongoing research

Ole B. Andersen
Professor, Department of Space Research and Technology
Geodesy and Earth Observation
DTU SPACE

Project: Assessment of renewable wave energy resources in the coastal zone using high-resolution altimetry products
Research Institution: CENTEC (Centre for Marine Technology and Ocean Engineering), Instituto Superior Tecnico , (Associação do Instituto Superior Técnico para a Investigação e Desenvolvimento) – IST-ID, (Portugal)

The project’s primary objective is to evaluate the potential of wave renewable energy sources in the Atlantic Ocean, with a particular emphasis on the coastal region, where the energy can be efficiently harnessed. To achieve this objective, the project is processing the whole CryoSat, Sentinel-3A, and Sentinel-3B missions data over specific coastal zones and using an improved geophysical retrieval algorithm: SAMOSA+ (Dinardo et al. 2018, Dinardo 2020).

The datasets generated through this project are expected to have a multitude of applications, ranging from evaluating renewable energy sources to gaining a better understanding of the impact of waves on the rise of sea levels. We want this project to benefit the whole altimetry research community, this is why the findings will be shared as we complete the project

Sonia Ponce de Leon A.
Assistant Researcher
CENTEC-IST-University of Lisbon

 

Why EarthConsole®

EarthConsole® has been selected as the optimal service provider to perform the processing activities requested by the projects.

With the ESA Altimetry Virtual Lab (AVL) hosted on the platform, EarthConsole® provides the necessary services and solutions to cater to the specific needs of the altimetry research community.

The ESA Altimetry Virtual Lab is hosting SARvatore for CryoSat-2, SARINvatore for CryoSat-2, and SARvatore for Sentinel-3 processors, among others. These processors will be used to reprocess CryoSat-2 altimetry mission data (CryoSSARinSAM+) and Sentinel-3A & Sentinel-3B data (Assessment of renewable wave energy resources in the coastal zone using high-resolution altimetry products) on specific areas and periods of interests indicated by the research institutions.

EarthConsole® utilizes flexible computing resources such as Worker Nodes, CPU, and RAM, in combination with a quick access to data on a Copernicus DIAS infrastructure. This minimises the impact of data transfer on processing time, enabling scalable processing campaigns to be completed within the projects’ time constraints.

In addition, EarthConsole® experts will oversee all processing activities, freeing up researchers from the task of managing the processing campaign and IT infrastructure, allowing them to focus on their research goals.

In conclusion, EarthConsole® has once again demonstrated its commitment to providing innovative solutions that add value to altimetry research. With the needed processors, flexible computing resources, the quick access to the Copernicus datasets, and the right expertise, researchers can confidently pursue their research objectives, knowing that they have a reliable partner to support their efforts.

 

EarthConsole® on the OCRE Earth Observation Catalogue for Research

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EarthConsole®, powered by Progressive Systems, has been registered in the OCRE Earth Observation (EO) Catalogue for Research and its offering may now be selected by EO funding for research winners.

OCRE (Open Clouds for Research Environments) is a Horizon 2020 project funded by the European Union that aims to enable and facilitate research institutions to use commercial digital services in a safe and easy manner.

EO and cloud-based services offer the European research community a wealth of powerful tools, but for many researchers, these are currently out of reach, with suitable services difficult to find and select.

The OCRE project wants to address this need by making it easier to procure both Cloud and EO services. The EO Catalogue is a key result of such a project which aims to create a digital single marketplace for commercial EO and Cloud services for research in Europe.

The Earth Observation Catalogue is a useful tool for EO Funding for Research winners to find validated cloud and digital services which respond to the research and education communities’ requirements, saving institutions the time-consuming and complex process of doing this by themselves. For each of the EO Funding for Research winners, at least three of the EO companies in the OCRE EO Catalogue will be shortlisted to choose from. Then, based on the requirements and criteria of the research project and the response from these suppliers, a provider will be awarded, fulfilling the minimum requirements for a fair procurement.

Find EarthConsole® in the catalogue!