EPOS Thematic Core Service Satellite Data: the Contribution of Sentinel Missions to Establish a Comprehensive Multidisciplinary Research Platform for Solid Earth Sciences

The European Plate Observing System (EPOS) is a long-term plan to foster and facilitate the integrated use of data, products, software and services available from distributed Research Infrastructures (RI) in Europe in the field of Solid Earth Science (SES). EPOS is a pan-European Research Infrastructure of the ESFRI Roadmap; EPOS has recently become a European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC) hosted by INGV in Italy and supported by 25 European countries and several international organizations. EPOS integrates a large number of existing European RIs belonging to several fields of Solid Earth Science, from seismology to geodesy, near fault and volcanic observatories as well as anthropogenic hazards and satellite observations. In the EPOS vision there is the integration of the existing national and trans-national research infrastructures that will increase the access and use of the multidisciplinary data recorded by the solid Earth monitoring networks, acquired in laboratory experiments and/or produced by computational simulations. The establishment of EPOS will foster the interoperability of products and services in the Earth science field to a worldwide community of users. Accordingly, EPOS aims at integrating the diverse and advanced European Research Infrastructures in the field of Solid Earth Science and building on new e-science opportunities to monitor and understand the dynamic and complex Solid Earth System. One of the EPOS Thematic Core Services (TCS), referred to as Satellite Data (SATD), aims at developing, implementing and deploying advanced satellite data products and services, mainly based on Copernicus data (namely Sentinel acquisitions), suitable to be largely used by the SES community. This work intends to present the technological enhancements and the activities carried out to implement the TCS SATD and to deploy effective satellite services in a harmonized and integrated way. In particular, EPOS has recently concluded the validation process and is going to enter, in 2019, in the pre-operations phase. The TCS Satellite Data has successfully passed the internal and external validation processes and will deploy, in the pre-operations phase, three services (EPOSAR, GDM, COMET) developed to generate advanced Differential Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) Interferometry (DInSAR) products, such as interferograms, deformation maps, deformation time series, and velocity maps, based on the exploitation of Sentinel-1 data. These services can work in two different operative scenarios: systematic processing and on-demand processing. In the first case, the satellite products are automatically generated on specific and defined areas when new satellite acquisitions are available; the users can discover the available products directly in the EPOS central hub and download or integrate them with other EPOS products (GPS measurements, geological information, seismological observations, etc.). In the second case, the users can benefit from advanced web-tools made available by the TCS to process the DInSAR datasets of interest. With the on-demand services, the users exploit, through user-friendly interfaces, the availability, in the same environment, of SAR archives, Earth Observation tools, and Cloud Computing resources. The TCS SATD is integrated within the EPOS infrastructure through a common and harmonized interface that allows service providers and users to search, process, implement and share satellite images, results and processing tools. Such gateway of the TCS SATD is represented by the ESA Geohazards Exploitation Platform (GEP), a new cloud-based platform for satellite Earth Observations, designed to support the scientific community in the understanding of high impact natural disasters. TCS Satellite Data will use GEP as common interface of the TCS toward the EPOS portal to benefit from community-recognized data and metadata formats and standards as well as machine-to-machine protocols. Moreover GEP can host the TCS SATD on-demand processing tools that can be easily implemented in the advanced cloud-based environment provided by GEP, thus allowing users to gather and process on a cloud-computing infrastructure large DInSAR datasets without any need to download them locally and install desktop applications. In addition to the abovementioned three DInSAR services (EPOSAR, GDM, COMET), TCS SATD is also working on value-added tools and services able to provide synoptic information on the Earth surface displacements, their source mechanisms and their impacts. In particular, 3D-Def and MOD services, together with EPOSAR and COMET, will distribute source models, 3D displacement maps, and seismic hazard maps derived from satellite products both on-demand and in a systematic and continuous way. These latter services integrate satellite measurements, in situ observations and modelling techniques to extract information on the source mechanisms that have generated the surface deformation phenomena and to provide a synoptic view of the investigated phenomena. The implementation and integration within the EPOS infrastructure of the value-added services is on going and they will be released during 2019. Finally, all the products and results provided by the TCS SATD observe the FAIR principles. In particular, they are findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable, since the TCS uses formats and standard accepted by the community (e.g., ISO 19119, GEOTIFF, ASCII) and guarantees the open and free access to its products and results by applying CC-by and CC-by-NC licences.