Getting ready for the upcoming Charter activations - Part 3: dedicated Thematic Apps and systematic processing services

A Charter activation has a limited time to live. The Charter Project Manager (PM) focuses his attention and works on a given activation during a short time span that ranges from a few days to a few weeks.

In order to provide an environment where a PM can find all and only the information about a single activation, we are proposing a new approach for the discovery of activations in the Charter Processing Platform Trial on the GEP, and create a dedicated workspace for each single activation.

The first element is a new Community called Charter Plus:

The Charter Plus community contains several Thematic Apps:

  • A Global Thematic App that provides advanced Charter Activations discovery functions
  • A Thematic App for each Charter Activation, created automatically (with all its information and services content) upon reception of an activation notification from the Charter Operational System (COS-2)

Below a screenshot of the Global Thematic App showing an overview of all Charter Activations in the selected temporal period, where icons represent past/on-going disaster events.

The pop-up balloon that opens when clicking on the events icons contains a link to the associated and dedicated Thematic App for the selected Charter Activation.

A dedicated Charter Activations Thematic Application contains several elements:

  • The activation area(s) where all acquisition areas are listed and thus providing an effective method to understand where the event is impacting the most
  • The call acquisitions menu’ listing by mission, sensor and instrument all the acquisitions provided by the contributing agencies and communicated to the platform via notification from COS-2:

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  • The Earth Observations collections that are, one the one hand, useful for the Charter activation type (e.g. for an earthquake activation Sentinel-1 SLC are provided but not for a fire or cyclone activation) and on the other, used by the available value-added processing services also configured by activation type (e.g. Interferometry services for earthquake or hot-spots for fire activations):

  • The Earth Observation data processing pipelines where systemic processing scenarios can be configured to systematically generate value added products:

The value added on-demand processing services made available in the Processing Services Thematic App panel lists only the services that are relevant to the specific Charter Activation type.

Below an example of such a panel with a single service for illustration purposes:

We are convinced that the sum of these enhancements, currently available in prototypal version, will provide an effective and focused working environment to screen the EO acquisitions and provide a rich context of EO data and value added products to the Charter PMs.