Satellite

Marketing

Big data

Engineering

Aerospace engineering

Service (business)

Variety (cybernetics)

Data cube

Operating system

Data mining

Computer science

Cloud computing

Earth science

Data quality

Geology

Business

Satellite imagery

Alternative medicine

Geography

Political science

Environmental resource management

Environmental science

Data science

Artificial intelligence

Remote sensing

Medicine

Metric (unit)

Earth observation

Environmental data

Data sharing

Pathology

Scientific Data

Since the opening of Earth Observation (EO) archives (USGS/NASA Landsat and EC/ESA Sentinels), large collections of EO data are freely available, offering scientists new possibilities to better understand and quantify environmental changes. Fully exploiting these satellite EO data will require new approaches for their acquisition, management, distribution, and analysis. Given rapid environmental changes and the emergence of big data, innovative solutions are needed to support policy frameworks and related actions toward sustainable development. Here we present the Swiss Data Cube (SDC), unleashing the information power of Big Earth Data for monitoring the environment, providing Analysis Ready Data over the geographic extent of Switzerland since 1984, which is updated on a daily basis. Based on a cloud-computing platform allowing to access, visualize and analyse optical (Sentinel-2; Landsat 5, 7, 8) and radar (Sentinel-1) imagery, the SDC minimizes the time and knowledge required for environmental analyses, by offering consistent calibrated and spatially co-registered satellite observations. SDC derived analysis ready data supports generation of environmental information, allowing to inform a variety of environmental policies with unprecedented timeliness and quality.

The Swiss data cube, analysis ready data archive using earth observations of Switzerland