The ADAM federated data handling platform to enable scientific services development

The concept of ‘Digital Earth’ (DE), as outlined in 1999 by the former US Vice-President Al Gore, foresees a “multi-resolution, three-dimensional representation of the planet that would make it possible to find, visualise and make sense of vast amounts of geo-referenced information on physical and social environments”. The DE concept is quickly becoming reality, with a strong dynamic component provided by real time data, forecast and projections. The Copernicus programme provides a fundamental contribution to this concept. The challenge is to access and extract information from distributed data centres containing decades of global and local environmental data generated by in-situ sensors, numerical models, satellites, and individuals.

The Advanced geospatial Data Management platform (ADAM, https://adamplatform.eu/) implements the DE concept: ADAM allows accessing a large variety of multi-year global geospatial collections from satellites (Sentinels, Landsat, MODIS) model analysis and predictions (CAMS, C3S), enabling data discovery, visualization, combination, processing and download. ADAM provides datacubeless access and processing services, namely it exposes multi-dimensional (spatial, temporal, spectral …) subsetting capabilities as well as on-the-fly processing functions, so that the consumer (human or machine) gets only the piece of data wherever and whenever needed, avoiding transferring large amounts of useless bytes or massive local processing. Key feature of the ADAM concept is the standardization of the interfaces: each layer (discovery, access, processing, visualization) exposes OGC (https://www.ogc.org/)-compliant interfaces to foster federation and interoperability.

ADAM is an horizontal (generic) layer to support different vertical domains such as Agriculture, Cultural and natural heritage, marine applications, critical infrastructure monitoring, public health, education and media. This contribution focuses on two main operational applications for atmospheric sciences and climate change assessment and mitigation.

TOP (http://top-platform.eu/) is a web-based platform build on top of the ADAM data exploitation layer offering users from the atmospheric sciences domain a Virtual Research Environment (VRE) to exploit Copernicus atmospheric and climate data products, such as Sentinel-5 P data, CAMS products, European Environmental Agency in-situ measurements. Deployed on the Mund Dias, it is the first operational platform implementing the data triangle (EO, model and in-situ data) and hence creates an atmospheric multi-source data cube, stimulating a multidisciplinary scientific approach due to the availability of various collections.

One of the main effects of evolving climate is change precipitation and temperature regimes: EO provides a fundamental contribution for high resolution monitoring these variables. ADAM offers access to global datasets from Copernicus Climate Change services (C3S), ESA Climate Change initiative (ESA CCI) and the GPM program. In the framework of the ESA EO4SD Climate Resilience cluster (https://eo4sd-climate.gmv.com/), more than 30 climate variables and indicators were computed for climate screening, climate risk assessment and climate adaptation. Indicators are provided to various entities such as the World Bank Climate Change Knowledge Portal (CCKP, https://climateknowledgeportal.worldbank.org/). Another relevant example is the STRENCH project (https://www.interreg-central.eu/Content.Node/STRENCH.html) that allows managers of natural and cultural heritage sites to assess climate risk and define mitigation actions through the use of a dedicated webGIS tool fed by a large pool of climate indicators computed from models and satellite data via ADAM.