The GEP consortium led by Terradue (Italy) and with six partners from Spain, Germany, France, Greece and Italy, has successfully achieved the Acceptance Review of version 2 of the platform software and services. This marks a paramount milestone for the GEP community in the challenging journey initiated at the end of 2015. The v2 evolutions were driven by a built-in process for requirements analysis, design and implementation activities in consultation with geohazards users, in particular via:
- the GEP Community Survey launched in February 2016
- the gathering of monthly feedback about the utility of the services from the registered early adopters (e.g. InSAR specialists, mandated DRM organisations, geological surveys, etc.) with 70+ users
- the collaboration and synergy with application development projects (e.g. the ESA General Studies Programme, and the CEOS WG Disaster pilots and demonstrators)
- and discussions at community fora (e.g. EGU, FRINGE, ISTerre/MDIS Workshop, and training events organised by CNR IREA, ETH Zurich etc.).
The new version of the platform, GEP v2, provides a more robust environment and new functionalities able to meet user needs for efficient and cost-effective operations:
New data management & exploitation services
- Thematic Apps: rule-based bundling of data collections and processing services, to improve user collaborations within ad-hoc workspaces
- Direct access to Cloud processing outputs from the browser no longer requiring VPN Client setup
- Visualisation of data processing outputs: now handling CSV time series, KML & shapefiles for vector data, full resolution rasters (including legends)
- Improved visualisation performances: reduced display latency in the geobrowser, supporting the visualization of several large images and products
- Data uploads: self-service upload of user data on the platform, for consumption by processing services
- Results publication: direct publishing of the results of a processing chain for community sharing
- Display of dynamic histograms of a query result over selected time span and area of interest for any data collection
- Improved spatial filtering for the catalogue search: import of geometries (SHP, KML or geojson) and use of Gazetteer
- GEP results post-processing, using Jupyter Notebooks
Figure 1: the new GEP v2 portal organization in Thematic Applications
New Cloud Platform capabilities
- Enhanced Data Gateway
- Automatic multi-sourcing to optimise data access requests
- Programmable and systematic data caching
- Data usage accounting
- Personal cloud storage (repository)
- Improved Production Center, with (auto)scalability allowing cost-effective data processing on Cloud Computing clusters
- Integration with new Cloud-based processing environments
- Terradue Private Cloud - GEP domain
- CNR IREA Private Cloud - GEP domain
- CloudFerro IPT Poland
- EGI.eu (BELNET, INFN RECAS BARI)
- Amazon AWS
- Terradue is in dialogue with the providers of the Copernicus DIAS platforms
New resources as contributions from the community
- Toolbox for Processing Service integrators:
- Orfeo Toolbox
- Sentinel Application Platform (SNAP) extensions
- Stanford Method for Persistent Scatterers (StaMPS) extensions
- Toolbox for Virtual Desktop environments:
- Processing services integrated as part of the GEP Early Adopters Programme:
- TIO by ISTerre
- MineSAR by SATIM
- Land-SE and Land-STAT by CNR IRPI
- Optical and SAR Flood Extraction by e-Geos
and advanced processing services from the GEP consortium:
Dedicated demonstrations through Pilots led by the GEP consortium
Six GEP Pilots are now deployed or enhanced in order to demonstrate the benefit of virtualized and federated data processing:
- DLR with the systematic processing of Sentinel-1 Interferometric Browse imagery at 100m and 50m resolution
- TRE-Altamira with an advanced InSAR service for generating differential interferograms or PSI-based mean displacement velocity maps from a set of Sentinel-1 or ERS images
- CNR-IREA with the terrain motion Sentinel-1 based Surveillance service for the generation of Earth deformation time series and mean velocity maps
- EOST-CNRS with two services: DSM-OPT for Digital surface model generation from satellite optical stereo images and MPIC-OPT for detection and measurement of horizontal ground motion (e.g. co-seismic slip, landslides) based on sub-pixel image correlation
- INGV with the STEMP service for volcanoes monitoring based on optical data processing from Landsat-8, Sentinel-2 and Sentinel-3 images
- ENS-CNRS/NOA with a campaign to test and exploit GEP applications with the Corinth Rift Laboratory in which Greek and French experts of seismic hazards are engaged.
- Overall 20+ on-demand services using both Optical & SAR data grouped in Thematic Apps, according to the defined goals of Community Managers
- New advanced services are available for both Optical & SAR data processing (e.g. the SAR based SBAS multi-baseline processing chain of CNR IREA for InSAR measurements, the MPIC-OPT chain of CNRS EOST for Optical measurement using Sentinel-2 & VHR data etc.)
- New basic services providing full resolution GeoTIFF imagery (e.g. RASTER on-demand service process many EO missions data) and change detection imagery (e.g. the SNAP based COIN & SNAC tools) for rapid on-line visualization
- Overall 8 systematic services delivering continuously updated information layers on GEP, including the large scale production of Sentinel-1 InSAR browse images at both 100m and 50m resolution over tectonic regions
- Extended scope of the information extraction services, now covering:
- Classic InSAR diachronic analysis
- Advanced InSAR for Persistent Scatterers and Small Baseline time series
- Digital surface model generation from satellite optical stereo images
- Change detection from SAR and Optical imagery
- Detection and measurement of horizontal ground motion from Optical imagery
GEP v2 pre-operations are ensured at least until October 2019 and the GEP Early Adopter programme is able to on board additional users. Contact us at: geohazards-tep@esa.int.