Unlocking Antarctica: Building an Open Access Satellite Data Platform

Access to quality satellite data for wide-scale analysis and monitoring is essential for supporting Antarctic science, operations and management. We are building a new platform, based on Open Data Cube technology, to enable access to corrected continental scale satellite data for all of Antarctica and its surrounding areas of sea ice. This platform will provide users with openly accessible time-series data corrected and validated for Antarctic conditions for the first time, unlocking a vast resource of data spanning decades. The need for monitoring and understanding change across Antarctica has never been greater with rapid changes in sea ice, ice sheets and the oceans now observed and forecast to increase over coming decades with far-reaching consequences for global climate, sea level rise, ocean circulation and dependent ecosystems. Continued satellite monitoring, and the development of infrastructure that ensures data discovery and analysis, is critical for supporting our Antarctic science capability and providing a robust basis for decision makers. This presentation will provide an overview of the Digital Earth Antarctica platform and the planned processing pipelines that will produce analysis ready optical and SAR data. We will demonstrate the wealth of opportunities that will be unlocked to observe, monitor and understand Antarctic systems. Presented at the 2024 Australian Antarctic Research Conference