Large-Scale Data Management for Earth Observation Data—Challenges and Opportunities

Abstract. Earth observation (EO) has witnessed a growing interest in research and industry, as it covers a wide range of different applications, ranging from land monitoring, climate change detection, and emergency management to atmosphere monitoring, among others. Due to the sheer size and heterogeneity of the data, EO poses tremendous challenges to the payload ground segment, to receive, store, process, and preserve the data for later investigation by end users. In this paper we describe the challenges of large-scale data management based on observations from a real system employed for EO at the German Remote Sensing Data Center. We outline research opportunities, which can serve as starting points to spark new research efforts in the management of large volumes of scientific data.