Cloud Native Geospatial: Realizing the Digital Earth Vision

Since Al Gore originally pitched his vision for a Digital Earth in 1999, we’ve made significant progress towards its realization. Earth observation (EO) data is no longer shared in a raw form, it is processed to agreed analysis ready data specifications and made available at a global scale. The cloud optimized geotiff has emerged as the predominate data format for storing EO data and the spatio-temporal asset catalog specification has been broadly adopted, providing a common method of describing and discovering available data. This combination of technologies and capabilities represents a new paradigm for working with the vast collections of data now accessible on the public cloud and is referred to as cloud native geospatial.This paper covers background concepts relating to cloud native geospatial, then charts the history of some Digital Earth programs and places them in context with the new availability of global analysis ready data collections. It then provides some examples of how this new capability can be used to enable more people to access more data more easily.