Erwin Goor - former PROBA-V MEP project manager at VITO European Commission / EASME

PROBA-V 100 m image of Mary, a city on an oasis in the Karakum Desert in Turkmenistan

Building interconnected platforms to cope with today’s environmental challenges

Erwin Goor

- former PROBA-V MEP project manager at VITO European Commission / EASME

PROBA-V 100 m image of Amu River, Tadzjikistan-min

PROBA-V 100 m image of the Kilimanjaro Region, north east Tanzania

“Next to the small satellite and massive amounts of global vegetation data, the PROBA-V Mission Exploitation Platform (PROBA-V MEP) complementing the PROBA-V user segment by offering an operational Exploitation Platform on the PROBA-V data and derived products was built.

The initial development of the PROBA-V Exploitation Platform started already in 2008 with the ESA project SSE-GRID in which we built and demonstrated a multi-mission processing chain deployed on grid resources at ESRIN and VITO processing MERIS and SPOT-VEGETATION data respectively. Later on, we moved towards a private cloud at the VITO data centre and adopted Hadoop/Spark to provide distributed processing and data analytics on the full archive as an operational service for our users, with an acceptable complexity.

In this R&D trajectory towards an operational service and with the support of ESA and BELSPO, we could position the PROBA-V mission in the network of Exploitation Platforms (TEPs and MEPs) and various EC projects e.g. in the context of GEO serving the wider land community. Working with this community was inspiring & extremely interesting!

What started as an experiment in 2008 with few believers, finally contributed modestly towards today’s vision of building interconnected platforms, allowing our users to extract knowledge from an ever-growing environmental data space. A necessity for Europe to cope with today’s environmental challenges and to play a leading role in the Digital Age!”