The Geohazards Exploitation Platform (GEP) is a European Space Agency (ESA) initiative within the ecosystem of Thematic Exploitation Platforms (TEP) focuses on the integration of Ground Segment capabilities and ICT technologies to maximize the exploitation of EO data from past and future missions. A TEP refers to a computing platform that deals with a set of user scenarios involving scientists, data providers and ICT developers, aggregated around an Earth Science thematic area. The Exploitation Platforms are targeted to cover different capacities and they define, implement and validate a platform for effective EO data exploitation in a given thematic area.
In this framework, the GEP aims at providing on-demand and systematic processing services to address the need of the geohazards community for common information layers and to integrate newly developed processors for scientists and other expert users.
The GEP offers this expanding community a unique set of tools to forge new applications in direct collaboration with a large number of players. In particular, the community will benefit from a cloud-based workspace, allowing advanced EO data exploitation activities and offering access to a broad range of shared processing tools. Each partner brings their own tools and processing chains, but also has access in the same workspace to large data sets and shared processing tools.
The GEP has now on-boarded over 70+ early adopters and is entered in the pre-operations phase during 2016 by developing new Pilot applications that will significantly augment the Platform’s capabilities for systematic production and community building. Each project on the Platform is concerned with either integrating an application, running on demand processing using an application available in the platform or systematically generating a new product collection.
Under a Consortium lead by Terradue Srl, six new pilot projects have been taken on board: time-series stereo-photogrammetric processing using optical images for landslides and tectonics movement monitoring with CNRS/EOST (FR), optical based processing method for volcanic hazard monitoring with INGV (IT), systematic generation of deformation time-series with Sentinel-1 data with CNR-IREA (IT), systematic processing of Sentinel-1 interferometric imagery with DLR (DE), terrain motion velocity map generation based on PSI processing by TRE-ALTAMIRA (ES) and a campaign to test and employ GEP applications with the Corinth Rift EPOS Near Fault Observatory.
Finally, GEP is significantly contributing to the development of the satellite component of the European Plate Observing System (EPOS), a long-term plan to facilitate the integrated use of data, data products, and facilities from distributed research infrastructures for solid Earth science in Europe. In particular, GEP has been identified as gateway for the Thematic Core Service “Satellite Data” of EPOS, namely the platform through which the satellite EPOS services will be delivered.
In this work we show how the GEO Geohazards Supersites community can fully benefit from availability of an advanced IT infrastructure, where satellite and in-situ data, advanced satellite processing tools and web-based visualization instruments (Figure 1) are at the disposal of users to address scientific questions. In particular, we focus on the contributions provided by GEP for the management of EO data, for the implementation of a European e-infrastructure, and for the monitoring and modelling of ground deformations (Figure 2) and seismic activity (Figure 3).