Earth Observation for Public Health

Client

Public Health Agency of Canada

Location

Canada

Project Duration

June 2019 – 2023

Background

The Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) is monitoring risks associated with tick-borne and mosquito-borne diseases in Canada. Satellite Earth Observation (EO) data can be used to estimate and monitor environmental and climatic determinants of these diseases. However, satellite EO data is now too big to analyze using traditional desktop analytic tools. The Earth Observation for Public Health (EO4PH) project seeks to overcome this challenge by creating a system to store and process satellite EO data over wide areas and deep timeseries with integrating tools for data ingestion, data processing, ground truth data management, metadata management, and scalable interactive analytics.

Services Provided

To demonstrate how cloud computing systems can overcome issues with traditional approaches to satellite EO data analytics, Hatfield created the GEO Analytics Canada platform (www.geoanalytics.ca).

Our approach to designing and implementing the GEO Analytics Canada Demonstration Platform integrates the following:

• Bring the user to the data – to achieve high performance geospatial data analytics, it’s critical to bring the user to the data and avoid downloading wherever possible.
• Cloud native – Cloud geospatial involves more than simply migrating desktop apps to the cloud. The GEO Analytics Canada Platform is built from the ground-up to leverage the power of cloud computing.
• Infrastructure vendor agnostic – the GEO Analytics Canada Platform can be installed on a wide variety of cloud computing providers. We can pursue hybrid and multi-cloud architectures that exploit pre-existing distributed data stores, such as Landsat and Sentinel data.
• Part of an ecosystem of open architected systems – the GEO Analytics Canada Platform is a starting point towards an open architected, distributed ecosystem approach to satellite EO data analytics. We believe that platforms should not require all data and tools to be centralized in one place. Instead, data and processing resources should be distributed to exploit pre-existing distributed data stores.
• Supporting open science – all GEO Analytics Canada Platform tools and systems support the key tenants of open science: “openness, transparency, scrutiny and traceability of results, access to large volumes of complex data, and the availability of community open tools”.
• Canadian focused – the platform stores its data completely in Canada and uses Canadian-hosted computer resources. This supports Canadian organizations that are required to fulfill Canadian privacy laws which require data to be kept in Canada.

The Demonstration Platform comprises custom built, fully integrated systems that are built on top of cloud-based storage and computational systems. These systems remove the need to download EO data in order to conduct visualization and analysis of large satellite EO datasets in a scalable, performant manner.

User tools provided in the Platform include:

• authentication, security and user management systems;
• EO data query and discovery systems;
• massively scalable EO data ingestion and pre-processing systems;
• a JupyterLab-based scalable data analysis environment;
• on-demand personal Ubuntu desktops in a browser;
• a file browser system; and
• a ground truth data management system.

For machine-to-machine integrations, SpatioTemporal Asset Catalogue (STAC) , web mapping tile services (WMTS), and Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) API-Features and API-Processes endpoints are being included.

Find detailed information about GeoAnalytics Canada at www.geoanalytics.ca.