Australia's Regional Copernicus Data Access/Analysis Hub Initiative

The European Union¿s Copernicus programme will change the global Earth observation landscape, providing vast amounts of data on an operational basis over the long term. However, the huge data volumes that are the strength of Copernicus also present its major challenge. Ensuring that this volume of data is made available in forms that make it usable is very challenging. Old paradigms based on each individual user downloading all data to local systems for their own applications will not scale sufficiently to support the volumes of data that Copernicus will produce.
Particular technical challenges exacerbate these issues in the region around Australia: South-East Asia and the Pacific. Bandwidth is often limited, and data storage for huge volumes of data can be problematic. Tackling these problems at the level of individual institutions or users, where data is downloaded many times, is even more problematic; and when implemented, such ¿silo¿ type solutions create barriers to collaboration across domains and disciplines that Copernicus, by virtue of the comprehensiveness and consistency of the data it offers, makes possible. Australia is using its location in the region, and its expertise, to support the European Union to address these challenges. Through the Regional Copernicus Data Access/Analysis Hub, Australia will greatly improve access to Copernicus data for users in the South-East Asia and Pacific region. This will include providing access to very large volumes of Copernicus data ready for use and analysis. This will help avoid key barriers, particularly those caused by limited bandwidth in some parts of the region, and those related to the challenges of storing the Petabytes of data that Copernicus will generate in multiple locations.
As well as overcoming significant technical challenges that would otherwise prevent effective exploitation of Copernicus data within a specific country in the region, the Regional Copernicus Data Access/Analysis Hub is also intended to provide a platform to enhance collaboration across borders.
By enabling users from across nations, and across disciplines and sectors, to work together ¿around¿ the same data, and share and combine their results, barriers to cooperation and collaboration are broken down. This, in turn, enables people to work together more effectively in pursuit of the goals of fora such as Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation and Association of South East Asian Nations. Tackling challenges like sustainable livelihoods, growth of the blue economy, and climate change become easier. This paper reviews the history and status of the initiative, describes the unique approaches that are being taken to establish the data infrastructure, discusses how it will enable effective exploitation of Copernicus data across the South East Asia and Pacific region, and discusses how federal and state governments are collaborating to establish something that ¿gives back¿, in a very concrete way, to the nations that provide the satellite data that is so important to Australia. Presented at the 2016 Living Planet Symposium (LPS16) Prague, Czech Republic