Recent Activities in Earth Data Science [Technical Committees]

Recent trends on big Earth-observing (EO) data lead to some questions that the Earth science community needs to address. Are we experiencing a paradigm shift in Earth science research now? How can we better utilize the explosion of technology maturation to create new forms of EO data processing? Can we summarize the existing methodologies and technologies scaling to big EO data as a new field named earth data science? Big data technologies are being widely practiced in Earth sciences and remote sensing communities to support EO data access, processing, and knowledge discovery. The data-intensive scientific discovery, named the fourth paradigm, leads to data science in the big data era [1]. According to the definition by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology, the data science paradigm is the "extraction of actionable knowledge directly from data through a process of discovery, hypothesis, and hypothesis testing" [2]. Earth data science is the art and science of applying the data science paradigm to EO data.