Cloud computing for environmental monitoring using multi-source Earth Observation data

Development of satellite remote sensing platforms and sensors enables massive Earth Observation (EO) data available. Satellite earth observation data has been one of the most important scientific data for Global Change Research (GCR) studies. This paper focuses on developing a cloud computing infrastructure for environmental monitoring using inter-agency EO data. A test bed of collaborative computing platform based on cloud computing is introduced to coordinate EO data and computing resources to implement on-demand EO data discovery, access and data-intensive processing, which are time-consuming work for the GCR scientists to. EO data are commonly distributed archived and most of the non-commercial data can be accessed by internet. With more usage of EO data in the GCR, researchers must spend a lot of time to collect distributed data via limited internet access. And several steps such as data download, preprocessing, information extraction with specific algorithms or software, visualization and mapping should be done mostly by manual to get useful output for further applications, which has been the heavy burden for the research work. In this paper, a Geo-computing platform is introduced to harness multi-source EO data and coordinate computing resources for on-demand processing. Cloud computing and workflow technique are the key components of the platform. And several case studies such drought monitoring are used to test the performance of the platform.