E-collaboration for earth observation: Example challenge focused on the atmospheric correction of ocean colour data

The E-Collaboration for Earth Observation (E-CEO) project aimed to deliver a collaborative platform that, through data challenges, would improve the adoption and outreach of new applications and methods to process Earth Observation (EO) data. To test the E-CEO platform, a contest based on the Atmospheric Correction (AC) of ocean color data was proposed. Existing processors were tested, and the evaluation results analysed. Overall, the challenge showed that the E-CEO platform can be used to simplify the process of comparing different processors. Once the different participants' software is uploaded and connected to the data packages, the processing runs automatically, and so the processing is quick to re-run and adjust. However, additional work has shown it's important to continue to have human involvement in the evaluation step as otherwise statistics may be incorrectly interpreted due to outliers.We acknowledge ESA and ACRI-ST for developing ODESA (http://earth.eo.esa.int/odesa), which includes MEGS, and ESA for collecting, processing and making available the MERIS dataset. NASA have led the development of SeaDAS and the NOMAD database, which is available thanks to NASA and the PIs for collecting the in-situ data. ESA funded the E-CEO project under the Research Service Support activities (SOW TRPE-GSEG-EOPGSW-12-0001), with Terradue UK Ltd as the prime.