Fossgis: free data from the EU copernicus program - Christian Strobl¶

Tags: fossgis, geo

(One of my summaries of a talk at the 2017 fossgis conference).

See also my summary of the previous talk about free satellite images!

Christian works for the German aerospace center. The “copernicus” program consists of three parts:

• The space component. The “sentinel” satellites. Various types/goals. High resolution images, medium resolution images, altimetry (height measurements), atmospheric chemestry, etc. Not all of them have been launched yet.

• In-situ component. Local on-the-ground measurements for validation of the satellite images.

• Services component. Data access, calculation. This includes making products available that are directly usable without you having to have the knowledge to create it from the raw data.

  There is also an “emergency management service”. In case of a big accident or natural disaster, data is made available immediately.

  Land monitoring service: specific maps like land surface temperature, vegitation index, soil water index, etc. There is also extra (detailed) data for Europe.

  A starting point for searching data is http://copernicus.work-with.us/, the official info is at https://scihub.copernicus.eu/dhus/ . But: this central portal is often overloaded. The idea is that the individual countries take care of making local hubs. Partially, the data is also available via google’s earth engine.

  In Germany, https://code-de.org/ (“COpernicus Data and Exploitation platform”) is now online. There is also a listing of open source tools you can use.