Multitemporal data management and exploitation infrastructure

The development of new technologies and tools for as-much-as-possible automatic multi-temporal data analysis has been a goal for most of the institutions that aim at promoting the use of satellite data in different application domains. In the framework of the Support by Pre-classification to specific Applications Project, started in 2008, the European Space Agency has requested the development of a specific platform, named Multi-sensor Evolution Analysis (MEA), with the scope of demonstrating that long term satellite datasets coming from different sensors can be accessed and exploited in almost real time (few seconds) from a web application as user interface. The MEA system has been implemented based on 15 years of global (A)ATSR data (1 km resolution), together with 5 years of regional AVNIR-2 data (10 m resolution), with the final aim of permitting on-the-fly Land Use / Land Cover Change analysis. Moreover, a modified version of MEA has been set-up to permit the multi-temporal analysis of pollution maps coming from satellite observations and ground measurements, demonstrating the generality of the pursued approach. The present work aims at introducing the basis of the MEA system, describing the two implementations for land cover and pollution multi-temporal analysis, including external validation activities being performed for the first application by third parties.