Highlights & Takeaways: PHIDIAS webinar on Intelligent screening for satellite data Use case

The second webinar of the PHIDIAS series of Use Cases took place on 14th of October, addressing the challenges and opportunities of screening a large amount of satellite data for detection and identification of anomalous atmospheric composition events.
The webinar, in collaboration with ESCAPE project, exhaustively demonstrated how new approaches for detecting, filtering and qualifying events of interest among the incoming flux of satellite atmospheric data can be exploited. Innovative methods for the analysis of atmospheric satellite data associated with high performance computing (HPC) and high-performance data analytics (HPDA) capacities can help in the detection of extreme atmospheric composition events, such as wildfires, urban pollution episodes, industrial incidents, etc., and in monitoring their impact on air quality and climate.

The main takeaways highlighted in the speakers’ presentation are the following:

• The need to detect and filter in real time relevant data coming from Earth observation from space
• The fact that Operational Models and systems have strong limitation to exploit «extreme» data, i.e. too far from the model
• The need to process big data volume with big computing resources, which is the reason of the cooperation among CINES, PHIDIAS project coordinator, and AERIS/ICARE, a Data and Services Centre mostly dedicated to satellite data
• The number of challenges encountered in analysing Sentinel 5P data

The webinar was moderated by Francesco Osimanti, Project Manager at Trust-IT Services and Communication and dissemination leader within PHIDIAS, who provided an exhaustive overview of the projects which has the goal to enable the Earth science and HPC community to discover, manage and process spatial and environmental data spanning from atmospheric, marine and earth observation.

The first key speaker was Pascal Prunet, CEO of Spascia and PHIDIAS Intelligent screening of satellite data use case leader, who introduced the use case, explaining how the project will provide new tools and approaches to deal with the measurements and the information, allowing better and more efficient use of the data, and pave the ways for finding new paradigms.

The second speaker was Nicolas Pascal, ICARE & SPASCIA Technical Director of the AERIS/ICARE Data and Services Centre, whose presentation focused on the need of HPC/HPDA Infrastructure and capacities for implementing intelligent screening in an operational context.

The third speaker was Dominique Jolivet, Senior scientists at HYGEOS, who provided an overview of the technical implementation of this PHIDIAS use case and illustrated the difficulties in analysing the data coming from Sentinel-5 Precursor.

Finally, Xavier Espinal, IT Technical Coordinator for Experiments and Departments at CERN and currently involved in the ESCAPE project, gave a presentation showcasing the ESCAPE Data Lake, a prototype bringing together data from different communities on a robust infrastructure that will appear uniform to users pooling storage infrastructures distributed across Europe.

If you miss the webinar, speakers' slides and recorded webinar are now available here.