The CEOS Analytics Lab: Addressing Civil and Commerical Data Interoperability

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The increasing availability and accessibility of commercial satellite data presents a unique opportunity for the Earth observation (EO) community to leverage new sources of remote sensing imagery. However, despite improved access to data and computation, conducting analyses with data from multiple platforms remains challenging due to interoperability barriers. Calibration and Validation (Cal/Val) efforts are essential to overcoming these obstacles by ensuring the quality and reliability of EO data and quantifying necessary adjustments for seamless integration. The Committee on Earth Observation Satellites (CEOS) Systems Engineering Office (SEO) has launched the CEOS Analytics Lab (CAL), an Open Data Cube (ODC)-based tool, to facilitate data processing and collaboration among researchers. In this paper, we present a pilot study using tools developed for CAL to compare commercial imagery to traditional civil government Earth observations. We demonstrate the usefulness of collaborative environments such as CAL and provide the community with tools which assist with commonly identified calibration and validation tasks necessary to perform interoperability studies. This demonstration lays a foundation for operations around the use and evaluation of commercial satellite data, supporting further developments in the CEOS and Open EO communities. We also present a set of tools, CalValToolbox, to the EO community to perform Cal/Val tasks.