This is the first Chilean project that combines various satellite sources of this magnitude and with this volume of historical data. This initiative is developed thanks to the strategic alliance between Data Observatory, Adolfo Ibáñez University and the local office of the Australian research agency CSIRO Chile. The satellite data cube will contribute to research on drought, red tide, urban development in the territories, among other topics of interest.
The “Data Cube Chile” is the first Chilean project that combines the most relevant open satellite data in the world, from Europe and the United States, with such a high volume of historical images of the country. Data Cube Chile has been developed since 2020 through an alliance between Data Observatory Foundation, Adolfo Ibáñez University and CSIRO Chile, the local office of the Australian Agency for Applied Science; and today it announces its first results by making available 38 years of satellite data from Chile, aimed at global research on climate change and territorial understanding.
Likewise, the Data Cube Chile team works to make their results available to researchers from universities and study centers, government agencies and industrieswho seek to innovate in a sustainable way.
The data that is already part of the system corresponds to the series of Landsat satellites (5-7-8-9) and also from the Sentinel-2 and Sentinel-3 satellites of the European Space Agency, among others. Sentinel-1 will also be available soon and is currently undergoing validation. The cube has indexed the date close to 1 Petabyte of data or 1000 Terabytes of information. The administration of this data is carried out with the support of other space agencies in the world, guaranteeing that the most recent data is available and connected to the Chilean system.
The prototype of this project continues to strengthen its features to deliver scientific applications for industry, decision makers in governments, academia and others; in areas such as water management, drought, agriculture, red tide or urban development in the different territories. For this, it makes available satellite data corresponding to the entire national territory: continental, insular and coastal.
According to him Dr. Orlando Jiménez, Executive Director of CSIRO Chile, “the Data Cube Chile represents significant opportunities for the development of research and innovation from Chile and with a global perspective, consolidating our country as a power in data science. In this context, the alliance with the Data Observatory and the UAI has given us the opportunity to take technologies that have been developed in Australia and combine them with innovative local work, with a scalable and flexible infrastructure in the cloud. This global alliance provides support and engineering solutions that contribute to a better use of machine learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI).
In the opinion of Álvaro Paredes, Data Science engineer and developer of Data Observatory (DO): «This project is extremely important for the country, since for those of us who work with this type of information, we know how time-consuming and complex it can be to acquire, process and integrate different sources of information that, on this platform, are ready for use. use. This allows the user to focus on the analysis and not on the acquisition, saving considerable time. This platform also makes it possible to generate all kinds of analyses, process automation, portability and interoperability, and facilitates cooperation between different researchers/developers. DataCube Chile will allow large-scale analysis to be deployed throughout the territory, on the different topics that are relevant to the country’s development.”
The project is aligned with the fundamental mission of the Data Observatory, which is to acquire, store, process, analyze and make available high-volume and quality data sets, to contribute to the development of knowledge, science, technology and innovation, thanks to the data science and AI.
As a regional projection of this project, CSIRO highlights the concept of “Digital Earth Americas”, which has already shown progress with partners in the region and which may result in a broader and more strategic alliance in Latin America, in order to strengthen and enhance ties between initiatives with similar data cubes in other countries.
In this sense, Jonathan Hodge, director of the Data Science and Integration Program at CSIRO Chilesaid: “We want to help Chile demonstrate the potential of cloud-based systems throughout Latin America, as part of the path that could lead us towards the collaboration initiative Digital Earth Americas, similar to others that already exist in the world. Chile has the potential to be one of the leaders in this work, given the development and joint work with several countries in the region and the rest of the world.”
In Latin America, Chile shares its own problems of climate change, in addition to others such as natural disasters, including floods, earthquakes, tsunamis, forest fires and others such as water scarcity and deforestation, the loss of wetlands and the presence of red tide; that make data critical information for decision making, specific applications to related industries and public policies.
Renato Cabrera, Dean (I) of the Faculty of Engineering and Sciences UAI, representative of the academics who contribute to the DOadded: «This unprecedented project allows us from the academy to articulate joint efforts to promote research, development and innovation, promoting the data science at the service of global problems such as climate change, and the use of data and satellite images with enormous projections».
Chile has an opportunity for economic growth of billions of dollars through Earth observation according to research carried out by the Australian Government and this alliance is an important step in that direction, since it allows access for the first time in Chile to decades of data and being able to use it through flexible and robust systems, which are used to understand our territory more deeply and make informed decisions based on applied science.
Precisely this reason motivated the research alliance between CSIRO and Data Observatory, a non-profit organization that arises from public-private-academic collaboration, led by the Ministry of Science, Technology, Innovation and Knowledge and the Ministry of Economy, Development and Tourism. , and created together with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the Adolfo Ibáñez University (UAI).
rmation about Data Cube Chile is now available for consultation at www.datacubechile.cl
Add Comment