Enabling coastal analytics at planetary scale

Abstract

Coastal science has entered a new era of data-driven research, facilitated by satellite data and cloud computing. Despite its potential, the coastal community has yet to fully capitalize on these advancements due to a lack of tailored data, tools, and models. This paper demonstrates how cloud technology can advance coastal analytics at scale. We introduce GCTS, a novel foundational dataset comprising over 11 million coastal transects at 100-m resolution. Our experiments highlight the importance of cloud-optimized data formats, geospatial sorting, and metadata-driven data retrieval. By leveraging cloud technology, we achieve up to 700 times faster performance for tasks like coastal waterline mapping. A case study reveals that 33% of the world’s first kilometer of coast is below 5 m, with the entire analysis completed in a few hours. Our findings make a compelling case for the coastal community to start producing data, tools, and models suitable for scalable coastal analytics.