WA Copernicus
Copernicus Australasia is a regional hub supporting Copernicus, Europe's most ambitious and multifaceted Earth observation programme to date. Pawsey's collection provides open access to data over Western Australia and South-East Asia, including territorial waters from Europe's Sentinel satellite missions. As part of the regional hub is established under an agreement between Australia and the European Union. Implementation of the hub is facilitated by arrangements between the European Space Agency, the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites and Geoscience Australia. The project is operated collaboratively by Geoscience Australia, Queensland Department of Environment and Science, New South Wales Office of Environment and Heritage, Western Australian Land Information Authority and the Commonwealth Scientific Industrial Research Organisation. In 2018 New Zealand's Xerra Earth Observation Institute joined the consortium.
Area of science
Earth Observation
Systems used
Managed Storage
Applications used
MediafluxThe Challenge
Australia operates no Earth observation satellites, and has no plans to do so. Australia is entirely dependent on foreign satellites for data. The types of data captured by the Copernicus Programme will provide key input across all of the current applications for satellite data and the ability of the Sentinel missions to diversify Australia’s upstream data sources will remove key single source dependency risks. This means successful engagement with the Copernicus programme at both a strategic and technical level is critical for Australia.
The Solution
Provide a platform in WA to lower the technical barriers to the research community and private sector to extract value from EOS, supporting innovation, collaboration and commercialisation activity.
– Reduce duplication and overlap between layers of government.
– Make data more accessible and usable for government purposes.
– Increase resilience by increasing the feasibility of having backups and archives.
– Give Australian industry access to a data platform that would enable them to develop value-add products for, and deliver them to, countries in
our region.
The Outcome
Operation of the regional data hub:
1. supports the business requirements of partner agencies, including government;
2. forms a consolidated approach to enhance access to satellite Earth observation data for research, industry and civil society; and
3. fulfils a commitment to give back to the international satellite Earth observation community.
List of Publications
Refer to http://www.copernicus.gov.au/ for further information about this project. The project isn’t intended to create its own publications (governance is challenging in this respect), but researchers who do use data from this project should be publishing.
