CEOS Analysis Ready Data for Land (CARD4L) Overview

For many land monitoring applications using remote sensing, lack of data is no longer an issue, as it may have been in the past. Programs, such as Copernicus by the European Commission and the Landsat Missions by the United States Geological Survey, have adopted systematic acquisition strategies, and distribute vast amounts of satellite data under open licenses. In parallel, storage and computing capability have evolved to make it cost-effective and practical to process and analyze these data at various scales. Data architecture solutions, such as the Open Data Cube (ODC) and the Copernicus Data and Information Access Services (DIAS), are providing frameworks that make [scientific] analysis much simpler and straightforward. However, enabling non-expert users without the expertise and/or computation resources to pre-process and store low-level data products in order to exploit these capabilities, has proven more challenging. The Committee on Earth Observation Satellites (CEOS <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sup> ) is working to address this challenge through the CEOS Analysis Ready Data for Land (CARD4L) initiative [1]. CARD4 L is foreseen to enable users to access satellite data products that are `ready to use' for a wide range of land applications. Moreover, CARD4L aims to enable non-expert users access to products that have been processed `far enough' to be suitable for immediate analysis for a range of applications, while ensuring they are not too specific to only be used for particular topics or areas. CARD4L will be an important enabler of the Open Data Cube (ODC) initiative [2]. Through CARD4L, users will be able to easily locate products that are suitable for ingestion into Data Cubes [3], and will have confidence that these different CARD4 L products will limit as far as possible barriers to interoperability.