A continental communication network for remote sensing and GIS data

Monitoring Canada's forests with remote sensing necessitates the handling and distributed processing of vast quantities of remotely sensed data. A new project (EOSD) has been designed to create national forest products for Canada. Creation of the EOSD products will require the use of Landsat and Radarsat data, topographic GIS files, historical forest cover GIS files, and field plot ground data. The GIS and remote sensing data sources are distributed across Canada and the United States. During the next five years, there will be large increases in the volume of remotely sensed data. Canada through Canarie, a federally funded agency, created high-speed electronic networks, CA*net 2 and recently CA*net 3, for the rapid movement of large volumes of data. As a CA*net 2 activity, the authors created a capacity for moving large volumes of imagery over ATM and high-speed Ethernet networks. A terabyte of remote sensing data held within a robotic data store has been accessible from Pacific Forestry Centre over this network. The authors present the structure of the high-speed network for the EOSD project. This network links data stores at five research centers and the headquarters of Natural Resources Canada. It also connects to some provincial information systems and to numerous advanced networks of the United States. This latter connection will facilitate the transfer of EO-1 and Terra data from NASA. Issues related to distributed processing, meta data and security are discussed.