GEP v2 successfully passed Acceptance Review with ESA, now ready for pre-operations!

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.

Enriched Services Portfolio

  • 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.

Thank you for the update, I am happy to test GEP v2.

I just wanted to use the SBAS Stripmap (GPOD) but the ENVISAT data is no longer available under “EO Data”. As described here, it is currently the only input format for the service: https://docs.terradue.com/geohazards-tep/tutorials/gpod-sbas-insar.html

Will it be added again?

Dear Andreas,

thanks for the feedback.
It was a configuration issue, now solved.

180724%20EO%20data%20menu

Best regards

1 Like

Thank you very much for the answer, @hcaumont!

I just tried to run the SBAS with 38 images of ENVISAT ASAR L0 in Pakistan, defined a ROI and the parameters, but keep getting the message shown below.

It also happens at other locations with ERS data but I can’t figure out what’s the problem.

Error:
X-Powered-By: ServiceStack/3.971 Unix/Mono
Access-Control-AllowOrigin: *
X-AspNet-Version: 4.0.30319
Content-Length: 0
Cache-Control: private
Content-Type: application/xml

Hi Andreas,
we’ve opened a maintenance work for the GEP v2 access to the G-POD services.
You shall have now received the Maintenance Notice email about it.
We’ll keep the platform users informed as soon as this access is restored.
Best regards

Dear Herve,
thank you for the response. I received the mail earlier today and wish you good maintenance works!