Practices and Experiences in High Volumes of Satellite Data Management

High volumes of satellite data management within an organization is still challenging and daunting in the era of big data. The increasing information technology costs and limited budgets, growing satellite data needs, data availability across multiple teams and projects, strategic goals of organization, and expected project outcomes require better satellite data management mechanism and system to facilitate research and development activities. An organization level centralized satellite data repository is a practical solution to satisfy these requirements. This paper describes the best practices and experiences from building such a central satellite data repository within our organization, including data management strategy and policy, scalable and extensible system infrastructure, comprehensive data management system, and technical support and user assistance. These practices can be borrowed and applied in other organizations with similar requirements.

1. INTRODUCTION

Satellite data is very critical to research and development activities for land, ocean, and atmospheric processes, environment monitoring and assessment, sea surface observations, vegetation dynamics, ecosystem management, weather prediction, climate change, and so on [1]. Organizations are increasingly constrained by obtaining and managing high volumes of heterogeneous satellite data from various data sources [2].