The role of the ISIC facility for Climate and
Environmental Monitoring from Space (CEMS)
in the development of Quality Assured
Datasets and Downstream Services from
Earth Observation Data
Sam Almond, Logica &
Kevin Talsall, Telespazio Vega
http://isic-space.com/cems
Contents
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
What is CEMS?
Why is CEMS needed?
What CEMS offers?
Overall benefit to the UK
How CEMS enables Quality Assurance (QA)
CEMS QA / Data Integrity projects
1. TruDAT
2. Data Integrity Pilot Project
7. Looking forward
8. Conclusions
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1. Overview of CEMS
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CEMS is an ISIC facility to enable innovative climate and
environmental services to be developed, hosted and served to
users
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These services will be for widespread use by public and private sector
organisations in UK and internationally, supporting excellent science and
generating commercial revenues
CEMS will consolidate the UK’s leadership position in climate science,
calibration/validation & downstream applications, and will position the
UK for key opportunities e.g. ESA CCI, GMES climate services
What is unique about CEMS?
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It will make the data from satellites, ground and airborne sources
accessible in native & common formats
It will provide tools and information to ensure the integrity of the data
– science and commercial users will be able to rely on the information
It will provide a scalable model by hosting services and applications
close to high performance computing facilities and very large
quantities of source data
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2. Why do we need CEMS?
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Climate and global environmental change monitoring from
space is an increasingly exciting yet challenging task, leading to
potential benefits in science understanding of our planet, as well
as commercial opportunities for UK companies.
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The available volume of high-quality Earth observation (EO)
data is increasing exponentially, as new satellites are being
developed globally from both public and private funds.
•
These observations must be processed, quality controlled and
managed prior to visualisation and analysis, both independently
and in conjunction with state-of-the-art model predictions.
•
Leading-edge data processing, management and
dissemination capability at the ISIC Facility in Harwell will enable
the UK to maximise the value of these data and create economic
benefit across a wide spectrum of UK interests.
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3. What CEMS offers
At its heart CEMS is a facility that provides:
• High-powered processing and data storage:
• Processing: 240 real cores (480 virtual cores) & 2 Terabytes (2000
Gigabytes) of memory
• Storage: 1.7 Petabytes (1.7 Million Gigabytes)
• Accessible through Virtual Machines allowing access from anywhere
• Data processing: Users can process large amounts of data efficiently
& cheaply
• Application hosting: organisations can take advantage of CEMS
processing and storage capacity and use CEMS to reach a wider
audience for their applications
• Data Integrity Facility: provides key QA information to help users
determine if their data is fit for purpose
• Consultancy: access to the wide-ranging skills of the ISIC partners
• Visualisation and Application Centre: utilise existing ISIC facilities
such as the Applications Innovations Centre and the Visualisation Suite
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3. CEMS Technical Implementation
App 1
App 2
Data Access
Quality Services
App 3
…
App N
Data Processing
Public and Commercial Cloud Infrastructure
Cloud Management
Services
Core
Applications
Services
Business and research
user communities
Hardware – data storage [NCEO and Commercial Data] and processing
3. The CEMS Overview
4. Overall benefits to the UK
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•
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The implementation of CEMS through ISIC enables the
infrastructure to act as a platform for science and commerce to
develop further activities which will bring economic benefit to the UK.
In science, CEMS will support evidence on how Earth system
components are changing, through the provision of long-term,
quality-controlled data sets for climate and geo-hazards research.
In commerce, the CEMS core infrastructure will provide the means
to develop commercial applications with a focus on UK sectoral
strengths:
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Financial markets (carbon trading) - informed use of climate and
carbon data - potential revenues/benefits throughout the value chain,
rising from £1-2M in 2013/14 to more than £100 million p.a. by 2016.
Insurance/risk markets – modelling/services using improved
knowledge of environmental data; risk/hazard forecasting, etc.
Environment/energy markets – use of UK and global datasets to
inform decision making and forecasting
Services relevant for many public sector users e.g. Defra, DECC, etc.
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5. How CEMS enables QA in EO
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•
QA is important to enable users to make judgements on the quality,
provenance and suitability of any potential datasets
The Data Integrity study recommends that CEMS provides:
• Adopt a DI framework based on QA4EO principles
• A DI Helpdesk and Consultancy Service to assist users in
optimally utilising EO and climate data
• A Certification Service to allow for quality certification of data
• The ability to create bespoke tools to enable the completion of
‘missing’ data integrity information not provided by data providers.
• User access to such tools to enable users to perform their own
comparative validation exercises of data within CEMS
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5. The CEMS QA / DI process
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6. CEMS QA / Data Integrity projects
CEMS has already successfully bid for QA / DIF projects :
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TruDat – led by NPL: Detailed data integrity procedures will be
developed using optical & SAR
Data Integrity Pilot Project – led by Vega: Use SST data as a
basis to produce a prototype added value product and pilot data
integrity service.
HIVACROM – led by Logica: Crop monitoring service using EO
data to accurately estimate crop yields (initially potato & sugar beet)
CHARM (Characterisation of metadata) (FP7) - Enable climaterelevant data to be consistently characterised as to their
provenance, errors, biases and consistency; develop tools to
enable users to access information to determine dataset fitness of
purpose.
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6. TruDAT
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TRUsted DATa for Carbon, Science and Finance
TSB project lead by NPL, partnered by University of Sheffield & Logica
Objective is to provide a quality develop strategy / methodology to establish
rigorous Quality Indicators (QI based on QA4EO) on CEMS delivered EO
data/products
Forest Carbon Case study
QI used to enable harmonious,
consistent and seamless choice
of data sources (Optical and
SAR), processing steps and
validation data
Prototype Automation of process
within CEMS and also provide
visualisation tools
Applications include carbon
trading, validating climate data
and low carbon technologies
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6. Data Integrity Pilot Project
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TSB project lead by Telespazio Vega, partnered by NCEO & Logica
Objective is to create a pilot demonstrator of a Data Integrity Facility within
CEMS using a sample dataset of ESA’s Envisat Advanced Along Track
Scanning Radiometer (AATSR) data.
It will address 3 key Data integrity recommendations:
1. Establish a Helpdesk with capability to answer user questions
related to the DI data provided with the dataset
2. Establish a DI Certification process through an appropriate
metadata schema, by which the sample dataset may be assessed
3. Develop an environment and associated Tools specifically
developed for assessing the AATSR data and the output information
fed into the DI certification process
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7. Looking forward: CEMS strategic goals
Integrated Delivery of Climate Data
• Major processing & delivery node of timely, robust and synthesised satellite
information products from ESA’s CCI
• CEMS platform/infrastructure to help enable the UK to become the world
leader in climate science, validation, adaptation, mitigation and commercial
climate services
GMES Service Provision
• CEMS to be a leading European node for Sentinel data and services, initially
ensuring the GMES Sentinel 1 & 2 data supports a unique set of tools and
services.
Stimulating Commercial Applications
• ISIC & CEMS to provide the open innovation environment and infrastructure to
stimulate the development of a vast array of commercially hosted applications
Next Generation Visualisation Facilities
• Enable users to visualise a wealth of data sets using state-of-the-art extraction
and animation tools to monitor the health of our oceans, validate carbon
assets and inspire our next generation of young scientists.
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8. Conclusions
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CEMS provides a unique facility to enable innovative climate and
environmental services to be developed, hosted and served to
users
•
It positions the UK to take a leadership role in key UK and
international opportunities in the climate and environmental
services domain
•
CEMS will help foster growth in the downstream applications that
are predicted to increase with availability of vast quantities of EO
data
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A key principle of CEMS is focused on the Quality Assurance and
Data Integrity of EO and climate data, allowing users to make
informed choices about their data
•
CEMS has already begun providing additional QA data, as can be
seen by the QA / DIF projects started
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Questions
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