The Australian DataCube and Carbon
Accounting
Alex Held
November 2, 2015
LAND AND WATERThe Australian National Carbon Accounting System uses
Satellite Data to Detect Land Clearing and Regrowth
As part of theannual Greenhouse
Gas report to the
UN-FCCC, Australia
undertakes
continental scalemonitoring of forest
cover using remotesensing data at 25meter resolution
every year.
Landsat time series
data from 19722015

National Carbon Accounting Systems require
Data Continuity of time-series at suitable spatialresolution

OLIMSS

TM & ETM+- 8 Landsat satellites (NASA – USGS)- Two major sensor changes over the inventory time series• MSS to TM transition• TM / ETM+ to OLI

System uses ~ 400 Landsat scenes per year to map forest
cover and change across 7.5 million km2 for last 19 years

Source: Australian Department of Environment & CSIRO

Goal is to map changes in forest cover at
sub-hectare basis across the continent

1995

conversion

Mapping of Forest change: Deforestation and re-forestation

2000

Fire

Post-Fire
Regrowth

Native Forest

FireRegrowth

Harvesting

Clearing?

Input - remote sensing –forest cover change

Input - land management
information

Input – climate data

Carbon stock
outputs

We are hereChallenge: How best to integrate multiple satellite data
streams to enrich the Landsat data

9

Australian Geoscience Data Cube

How to efficiently managed massivesatellite data volumes for Australia

10

Australian Geoscience Data Cube

Traditional remote sensing product process- now everyone

Australian Geoscience Data Cube

12

New Data Cube remote sensing paradigm is to provide asingle source of “analysis ready data” to end-users,
saving about 80% of the work and costs required byseparate agencies to get the satellite data to such a level.

Australian Geoscience Data Cube

13Computational Capacity- The National Computational Infrastructure (NCI)• Raijin @ National Computational Infrastructure• 57,472 cores (Intel Xeon Sandy Bridge technology, 2.6 GHz) in 3592 computenodes;• 160 TBytes (approx.) of main memory;• 10 PBytes (approx.) of usable fast filesystem (for short-term scratch space).

*http://top500.org/

15

Australian Geoscience Data CubeFirst tests of new “DataCube” technology in Australia:
Mapping historical floods and inland water

16

Australian Geoscience Data CubeContinental Surface WaterNFRIP water detection

Sentinel 2 and the Australian Geoscience Data Cube•

15 Years of data from LS5 &LS7(1998-2012)•25m Nominal PixelResolution•Approx. 133,000 individual
ARG-25 scenes in ~12,400
passes•Entire archive of 1,312,087
ARG25 tiles => 21x1012
pixels visited•

3 hrs at NCI (elapsed time)
to compute.

Kenya Data Cube Project
The Kenya Data Cube Project is led byNASA-SEO and the Australian Government(Geoscience Australia, CSIRO andthe Dept. of the Environment).
 The project has a large number of stakeholders andfunders ... Australian Government, NASA, USGS,
United Nations REDD+ and FAO, Gates Foundation,Clinton Foundation (CCI and SLEEK), SilvaCarbon.
 The project brings together large number of CEOS
groups ... Space Agencies (satellites),
NASA-SEO (data tools), SDCG for GFOI, LSI-VC,
WGISS (data archives), WGCapD (training) andGEOGLAM.
Kenya and Colombia CEOS DataCubes – Testing
Integration of Interoperable Optical and RadarData• Kenya Data Cube
project plans tointegrate optical andradar data within thesame user interface.
• Landsat-7 mosaics andALOS PALSAR mosaics(example on the left)
can be utilized togetherfor improved forestclassifications inpersistant cloudyregions.
• ALOS data provides
unique information
about vegetation
structure and biomass
especially in low
density and regrowing
forest regions.

Landsat-ALOS Mosaic Example
An integrated mosaic
was created with theData Cube over central
Kenya for Oct-Nov 2010
using Landsat-7 and the2010 ALOS-PALSAR 25mmosaic.

Combined Mosaic ProductLandsat-7

ALOS-PALSAR data canbe used to fill areas ofcloud cover and scanline “banding” within
the Landsat-7 imagery
for improved forestclassification andbiomass information.

ALOS-PALSAR

Conclusions• Australia has an operational system in place tomeet the UNFCCC reporting• Our systems are subject to ongoing
improvement and innovation• DataCube technologies offer a new approachfor petabyte-scale satellite data analysis andimproved access to large archives bydeveloping countries.
• We are testing the DataCube and latest
research to improve future national estimatesof greenhouse gas emissions

Thank you
ありがとう (Arigatou)