GEP provides large scale processing of Earth Observation data. Designed in the context of the Geohazards Supersite initiative (GSNL) and the CEOS Disasters Working Group which address a Task of the Disaster Societal Benefit Area of the intergovernmental Group on Earth Observations (GEO). A model for partnership and community building that is user driven. Started from the International Forum on Satellite EO and Geohazards organised by ESA and GEO in Santorini in 2012 (140+ participants from 20 countries, 70+ organisations incl. international organisations, public institutes, space agencies, universities & private sector).

1. Geohazards Exploitation Platform
Pedro Gonçalves
Terradue

2. An ESA originated R&D activity on the Earth Observation ground segment to
demonstrate the benefit of new technologies for large scale processing of EO data.
Designed in the context of the Geohazards Supersite initiative (GSNL) and the
CEOS Disasters Working Group which address a Task of the Disaster Societal
Benefit Area of the intergovernmental Group on Earth Observations (GEO).
A model for partnership and community building that is user driven. Started from
the International Forum on Satellite EO and Geohazards organised by ESA and
GEO in Santorini in 2012 (140+ participants from 20 countries, 70+ organisations
incl. international organisations, public institutes, space agencies, universities &
private sector).
Geohazards Exploitation Platform | GEP

3. Consortium: Terradue [lead] (IT), TRE ALTAMIRA (ES), CNR IREA (IT), DLR (DE), EOST-CNRS (F), ENS-CNRS (F), INGV (IT)
• Develop a Platform based on virtualization & federation of satellite EO data and
methods
• Provide innovative responses to the geohazards community needs (services & support)
➔ On-demand processing services to address AOI-specific analysis
➔ Systematic processing services to address needs for “common information layers”
➔ Massive Cloud Compute power, managing multi-tenant resources
➔ Access to Copernicus Sentinels-1/2/3 repositories
➔ Access to 70+ TB of EO data archives (ERS and ENVISAT), and specific data collections
from EO missions, such as JAXA’s ALOS-2, ASI’s Cosmo-Skymed and DLR’s TerraSAR-
X, provided under special arrangements in the framework of the
CEOS WG Disaster and the GSNL
Geohazards Exploitation Platform | GEP

4. GEP | Roadmap
Open under invitations/approval
Consolidation and evolution of the service
Access to EPOS IP users (within available slots)
GEP v1 validation with early adopters
Limited to early adopters
(under invitation), evolution
of the service on-going
Open,
consolidated and
stable service
GEP v2 pre-operations GEP v2 pre-ops ext.
100+ platform early adopters
40+ new users in the period
GEP Early Adopters Programme
Want to apply as early adopter of the GEP (limited slots)? geohazards-tep@esa.int
Toda
y
GEP v2 engineering
50 platform early adopters
28 new users in the period
22 platform early adopters
integrating application or
exploiting on demand processing
Nov 2015 Jul 2018
KO AR
Dec 2016
CDR
Dec 2018Feb 2015
As of July 2018:
920+ registered users

5. GEP | Monthly Statistics (Jul 2018)
EO/Non EO DATA ACCESSIBILITY and SERVICE USAGE
EO Data collections accessible
(i.e. the user can run a processing against these
data on the GEP)
Global Coverage with open access:
Sentinel-1, Sentinel-2, Sentinel-3, Landsat-8, ERS (SAR IM Level-0), ENVISAT (ASAR
IM Level-0)
Limited coverage collections with restricted access:
ALOS-2, TerraSAR-X, COSMO SkyMed, RADARSAT-2, Pleiades
Several datasets from various EO missions for the Charter Platform Prototype:
ALOS-2, TerraSAR-X, SPOT6/7, Pleiades, UK-DMC-2, Kompsat-2/3/5, Resurs-P,
Kanopus-V, RAPIDEYE, GF2
Number of processing requests launched
[by data source, month]
Sentinel-1 (6.856), Sentinel-2 (530), ENVISAT (176), Landsat-8 (30), ERS (20),
KOMPSAT-2 (4), KOMPSAT-3 (6), Pleiades (4), UK-DMC-2 (2)
Quantity of processing hours [month] 7.852 CPU/hours
Number of products generated [month] 19.395
Number of products published [month] 17.054
Number of products downloaded [month] 9.495

6. GEP Portal | Users visits and geo-distribution (Jul 2018)
1-Year

7. GEP | Users Uptake (Jul 2018)
The GEP has a total of 928 registered users from 77 countries world wide

8. GEP | Early Adopters (Jul 2018)
▪ 146 users (from 63 organisations and 28 countries) are carrying out projects on the platform via the Early Adopters Programme
▪ Mainly European users, but also from the rest of the world: Asia (Turkey, Thailand, Indonesia, India, Malaysia & Iran), Africa
(Morocco, Nigeria, Ethiopia), Latin America (Mexico and Chile) and North America (USA).

9. GEP | Early Adopters (examples)
User organisation Areas
Ecole Normale Supérieure de Paris (France) Etna, Italy and Corinth Rift, Greece
DLR IMF (Germany) European tectonic mask
Altamira Information (Spain) Test sites on landslides and earthquakes
ISTerre / Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris (France) Subduction zones of Latin America, the NAFZ and Tibet.
INGV Roma (Italy) Alto Tiberina Fault and Fogo Cape Verde
INGV Roma (Italy) Marmara, East sector of NAFS
INGV Roma (Italy) Haiti and West Java
ETH (Switzerland) Large surface deformations caused by landslides in Bhutan Himalaya
NOA (Greece) Geohazard sites in Greece incl. Corinth Rift
SATIM (Poland) Silesia & Warsaw (Poland)
Obs. Physique du Globe de Clermont-Ferrand (France) Piton de la Fournaise in La Réunion, Cordon del Azufre / Lastarria in Chile–Argentina
INGV Catania (Italy) Etna & Campi Flegrei / Vesuvius
British Geological Survey (UK) Urban areas of Great Britain
University of Leeds (UK) Active deformation in the Alpine-Himalayan belt
ESA Over calibration sites: Rain forest, Germany (DLR targets), Australia Milan, Chicago, Sao Paulo
ESA (Progressive Systems SLR) Greater Cairo, South Rayan dune field, Middle Egypt province and Aswan province
CNR IREA (Italy) Tests on Italian volcanoes and Hawaiian and Japanese volcanic and seismic areas
Universita De L’ Aquila (Italy) Abruzzo region: L’ Aquila and Teramo for post-seismic ground displacements
Volcanoes
Earthquakes
Landslides
Subsidence

10. GEP | Early Adopters (examples)
User organisation Areas
CNR ISSIA (Italy) Indonesia
IPGP (France) Asia, N& S America, Indian Ocean
Universidad de Concepcion (Chile) Southern Andean zone
Laboratoire de Dynamique Terrestre et Planétaire (France) South America active volcanoes and tectonics
BRGM (France) French coast subsidence
AIM CEA (France) La Reunion
National Cartographic Center (Iran) Iran
Instituto Geologico y Minero de Espana (Spain) SouthEast Spain
USGS (USA) Latin America volcanoes
CVGHM (Indonesia) Indonesian and Mexican volcanoes
CNES (France) Validation of tools for interferometric coherence over Syria and France
Istanbul Technical University (Turkey) Deformation time series (volcanoes and faults )and mean velocity maps
Institute of Geodesy Cartography and Remote Sensing
(Hungary)
Validated multi-technique of dynamics of anthropogenic ground deformations
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (Spain)
Identification of areas affected by wildfires, erosion and debris deposition/ ground motion due
to debris deposition in Mallorca island
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (USA) Ground deformation time series - landslides, volcanoes and flood mapping
Royal museum for Central Africa (Belgium) Image correlation for the investigation of surface displacement field of landslides
University College of London (UK) UK landslides
University of Rabat(Morocco) Morocco seismic activity
Volcanoes
Earthquakes
Landslides
Subsidence

11. GEP| Users & Supported Usage Scenarios
Type of users: typically geoscience centres hosting geohazard experts with skills in satellite EO that
process, analyze, validate, integrate data to generate products for DRM purposes to be used by decision-
makers (End Users).
End Users aren’t intended to be direct users of the Geohazards Lab.
Users come from several groups:
• users of thematic activities of the CEOS WG Disasters i.e. seismic, volcano, landslides and the R.O.
• the GSNL users
• other users of the geohazards community (the Geohazards Lab intends to support other users of the
geohazards community that are not in CEOS WG Disaster activities)
Three main scenarios:
1. EO Data Exploitation - A user runs on demand processing
2. New EO Service Development - A user integrates a new processing chain or modifies an on line
processing chains
3. New EO Product Development - A user runs a chain global/systematic to generate a new derived
information layer

12. GEP
Capabilities/Features

13. GEP | Avalable EO missions
Via the GEP Data Agency Catalogue, the Platform currently makes available for processing the
global coverage of the following data collections:
● Sentinel-1A/B: (RAW, SLC, GRD and OCN) synchronized* with the Copernicus Open Access Hub
● Sentinel-2: (MSI L1C) synchronized* with the Copernicus Open Access Hub
● Sentinel-3: (OLCI, SLSTR) synchronized* with the Copernicus Pre-Operations Data Hub
● Landsat-8: (OLI and TIRS) synchronized* with the USGS EarthExplorer
GEP is primarily focusing on InSAR and Optical processing with Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2
* metadata: complete catalogues published in NRT.
data: different solutions according to use case incl. co-located data & processing, on-demand data fetching, caching, etc.
Copernicus Sentinel-1, Sentinel-2, Sentinel-3
and US Landsat-8 data available globally

14. GEP | Other EO Resources
GEP has taken commitments about data access as per some recommendations associated to Fringe
➢ The GEP provides online access to ESA heritage EO missions data:
• ERS (SAR IM Level-0)
• ENVISAT (ASAR IM Level-0)
➢ Global coverage synchronized with the ESA VA4 (70+ terabytes)
Through agreements with CEOS partners and project
partners (CEOS Pilots and Geohazards Supersites),
limited private collections of the following missions are
made available for processing & download:
• ALOS-2
• TerraSAR-X
• COSMO SkyMed
• RADARSAT-2
Spatial density of ERS &
ENVISAT Level-0 data available
as of December 2017

15. Cloud Platform Capabilities - data
➢ Enhanced Data Gateway
• Automatic multi-sourcing to optimise data access requests
• Programmable and systematic data caching
• Data usage accounting
• Personal cloud storage (repository)
Supported Data Providers
Daily figures

16. Cloud Platform Capabilities - computing
➢ Improved Production Center, with (auto)scalability allowing cost-effective data processing on Cloud
Computing clusters
➢ Integration with new Cloud-based processing environments
• Terradue Private Cloud - GEP domain
• CNR IREA Private Cloud - GEP domain
• EGI.eu (BELNET, INFN RECAS BARI)
• Amazon AWS
• PSNC
• CloudFerro (EO IPT Poland)
moving processing close to the data
➢ Activities on-going/in negotiation with
• EODC in the context of the EOSC-Hub project: Systematic processing over the Alpine Region with DLR
High-Res InSAR Browse service using EODC Cloud resources and co-located Sentinel-1 data
• Serco ONDA DIAS: integration of the GEP as Reference Front Office instance
• CloudFerro CREODIAS: integration of systematic chains of the GEP
Federation of Cloud providers

17. GEP| Enriched Services Portfolio
➢ Overall 20+ on-demand services using both Optical & SAR data grouped in
Thematic Apps, according to the defined goals of Community Managers
➢ New basic services providing full resolution Geotiff imagery (e.g. RASTER on-
demand service process many EO missions data) and change detection imagery
(e.g. the SNAP based COIN & SNAC tools) for rapid on-line visualization
➢ Overall 8 systematic services delivering continuously updated information layers
on GEP, including the large scale production of Sentinel-1 InSAR browse images at
both 100m and 50m resolution over tectonic regions and volcanos
➢ Extended scope of the information extraction services, now covering:
• Classic InSAR diachronic analysis
• Advanced InSAR for Persistent Scatterers and Small Baseline time series
• Digital surface model generation from satellite optical stereo images
• Change detection from SAR and Optical imagery
• Detection and measurement of horizontal ground motion from Optical imagery

18. GEP| DLR’s InSAR Browse systematic chain
Systematic processing all S-1 pairs over world tectonic areas: amplitude, coherence & interferograms for all
6- and 12-day pairs. About 140 / day. 35000+ pairs processed to date (as of May 2018).
Free browse images at 100m resolution.
Left: coherence (R) and amplitude (G, B) over la Réunion.
Bottom Left: collection of coherence & amplitude composites over Europe.
Bottom Right: Examples of DEM corrected inteferograms.
Credits DLR.

19. GEP| Routine monitoring for systematic productions
S-1A 12-day Coherence Map over Europe

20. cm/year
>6<-6
Campi Flegrei Caldera
Systematic
S1-SBAS
processing
Sentinel-1
12/6 days
repeat cycle
EPOS
Geobrowser
SBAS Sentinel-1 Surveillance by CNR-IREA | Systematic
for ground deformation monitoring
● Systematic processing
on selected Areas of
Interest (AoI)
● Generates updated
surface displacement
maps and time series
(P-SBAS-InSAR
algorithm)
● Automatically
triggered by every
Sentinel-1 availability

21. Advanced InSAR service by CNR-IREA | S1-SBAS On-demand
SBAS-InSAR time series generation from Sentinel-1 data (@ ~30x30m spatial resolution)

22. GEP | Examples of Services → COIN

23. GEP | Examples of Services → COIN

24. GEP | Examples of Services → SNAC

25. GEP | Examples of Services → DIAPASON

26. GEP | Examples of Services → SNAP & DIAPASON

27. GEP | Examples of Services (PSI) → FASTVEL

28. GEP | Examples of Services (PSI) → FASTVEL

29. GEP | Examples of Services (PSI) → FASTVEL

30. Copernicus
Sentinel-2 surface
velocities over the
Harmaliere landslide
in French Alps
Support other CEOS Pilots that are
still pursuing their activities and
other demonstrator activities
✓ MPIC-OPT service (Multiple-
pairwise image correlation for the
monitoring of surface deformation
from optical image time- series):
Integration is on-going by
UNISTRA/CNRS EOST (processing
service for measuring horizontal
displacements from time-series of
optical satellite images
✓ ESA is working closely with CNES to
set up a mechanism to bring Pleiades
data on GEP for on-line processing
A service developped by
CNRS / EOST (Strasbourg)
S-2 image tile
Harmalière landslide
(French Alps)
Uptake by third-parties | CEOS

31. Uptake by third-parties | DRM Services
Charter Platform prototype
Following the discussion at the International Charter Major and Space Disasters Board meeting in Oxford in April 2017, prototype
processing platform have been implemented for testing to support the Project Manager and Value Adding partners of Charter activations.
Main goals:
➢ support Charter PM in operations (use case A)
○ Faster access to data
○ Help PM rapidly screen data (even before downloading the data) about whether data selected are useful for the
activation by using online co-registration functions, change detection functions and possibly some GIS capability
➢ support Charter VA partner in operations (use case B)
○ Faster access to data and ancillary datasets (e.g. DEM, OSV, etc.)
○ Perform part of the EO processing with online functions even before downloading data and remotely from any place
- On-line pre-processing of images (co-registering multi-sensor collections),
- On-line image analysis (e.g. change detection, a classifier to generalize some processing),
- Access to common tools (to be exploited offline) and some GIS capability (option)
➢ ESA started two processing platform prototypes to test the contribution of
TEPs to disaster response: one prototype is based on the GEP (disaster risk
management for geohazards themes)
○ automatic notifications about Charter activations from COS-2
○ now supporting 18 missions
The GEP based prototype was initiated in July 2017 and is about to enter a new
Trial period in Q4 2018.

32. • EPOS Implementation: the GEP will be available to EPOS IP users and provide the
interface for the Satellite Data Thematic Core Services towards the EPOS central hub.
• EPOS Operations: in return, during EPOS operations (from January 2020), GEP users will
have access to any other data available within EPOS IP and EPOS ERIC will
purchase GEP services from the GEP owner for EPOS users (estimated initial budget
allocation, 100k/year). ESA intends to be an associated partner (in preparation) within the
Satellite Data TCS governance scheme.
EPOS, the European Plate Observing System,
is a long-term plan to facilitate integrated
use of data, data products, and facilities from
distributed research infrastructures for solid
Earth science in Europe.
GEP selected as the gateway for the Satellite
Data Thematic Core Service in EPOS
Uptake by third-parties | Integration into a scientific network - EPOS
40

33. GEP | Take-home Messages
➢ Benefit from fast access to EO data, storage capacity and
processing resources offered by platform-based solutions
➢ A hosted processing platform is a partnership that needs the
support of scientist/developer to offer operational services
providing value added information to the community
➢ Platform e-collaboration and reproducible knowledge
promote innovation and response capacity

34. Early Adopters Programme
➢ New opportunities funded by @ESA_EO
➢Develop and/or integrate
data processing applications
https://geohazards-tep.eo.esa.int/

35. THANKS !
https://geohazards-tep.eo.esa.int/
Pedro Gonçalves | pedro@terradue.com