An EODC service for the Austrian EO user community

Earth Observation (EO) gathers information from our planet from a distance using satellite or airborne data, such as unmanned aerial vehicles. These techniques can be used for a large number of applications, to name a few:

• environmental and nature protection (e.g. habitat mapping or oil spill detection);
• agriculture (e.g. crop condition monitoring and yield predictions);
• forestry (e.g. tree species classification and timber stock estimations);
• climate change (i.e. detecting sea ice and water levels); and
• urban development (e.g. urban planning and urban sprawl monitoring).

The European Copernicus programme is operating and expanding an extensive constellation consisting of various EO satellites carrying a range of different sensors, such as Sentinel-1 fitted with an all-weather, day-and-night radar system and Sentinel-2 equipped with a multispectral high-resolution sensor. In total six different Sentinels are planned with each having multiple satellites. Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 have a revisit time of three and respectively five days, in effect provide a global coverage every three and five days. These are long-term operated and will be collecting data for the upcoming decades. The current seven operation Sentinels collect daily 15TB of raw data, thus an extensive archive of EO data needs to be maintained.