German Copernicus Data Access and Exploitation Platform

Abstract

We present the architecture for the planned German Copernicus collaborative data access and exploitation infrastructure. It shall enable the use of operational earth observation data from the Copernicus ground segment for applications and services developed by commercial, public and scientific institutions in Germany. Copernicus – the European Earth Observation programme Global Monitoring for Environment and Security – is an ambitious undertaking of the European Commission, the European Space Agency, EUMETSAT and all its member states, to support European citizens, decision makers, scientists and industry with a constant and reliable stream of up-to-date information measured by Earth orbiting satellites. Due to the high data volume of Sentinel and other future missions, access to Sentinel data in form of download and data distribution service is not enough. The infrastructure also has to provide hosted processing capacity following the Big-Data paradigm of "transferring the software to the data" that can be cost-effectively used by many projects and services in Germany and beyond.