Abstract
The Copernicus programme –the EU flagship on Earth Observation–routinely provides a variety of exiting new user-oriented products that constantly improve the monitoring of our planetary environment, its climate and the anthropogenic use and impact on it. Over the last decade this resulted inan incrementally growing amount of data and products. The Global Land component of the Land service has been generating many such core variables at global scale and with high time frequency. Product specific and rather unharmonized processing chains were used so far. Building on this experience, we know that combining and integrating production chains into an overarching architecture can lead not only to more harmonized, time and cost-efficient product generation, but also to an improved and integrated useof such data and products. This consequently facilitates the conversion of space-based Earth Observation information into actionable knowledge for a better response to the complex global change processes we are currently dealing with. Technological advances happen quick and now with cloud infrastructures we have the unprecedented means to make such deep integration possible. However, transforming an established operational setup, such as was developed and used for the Global Land Service over the years, to another completely new and technological challenging cloud computing environmentis not a trivial job. Especially considering that many production chains need to be decomposed into modular bits and pieces which then have to be newly forged into a smooth and fully integrated machinery to provide the user with a transparent, yet integrated, set of tools. The scope of this report is to tackle exactly this: providing clear suggestions for an efficient ‘cloudification’ of the Copernicus global land productionlines and user interfaces, and investigating if there is a tangible benefit and what would be the effort involved.