EarthCODE: Transforming Earth Observation Research into Action-Ready Information through Open Science

EarthCODE (https://earthcode.esa.int) is a strategic ESA EO initiative to support the implementation of the Open Science and Innovation Vision included in ESA’s EO Science Strategy (2024). 

Collaboration and federation are at the heart of EarthCODE. First, EarthCODE integrates a wide range of available EO cloud computing platforms and services, including engineering support; second, it catalogs and manages the FAIR and open data, code, and documentation from ESA Earth System science studies and experiments so they can be discovered, reused, and adapted to new contexts; third, it builds a community of practice of Open Science in Earth Observation science, supported by targeted community trainings, especially with the ESA Science Clusters - and by providing an open forum for discussion and co-creation. The initiative helps scientists discover, visualize, explore, reuse, modify, and build upon the research of others in a fair and safe way, as well as to create end-to-end reproducible workflows on EO cloud platforms – aiming to maximize the utilization of data products and workflows for Earth Action and to systematically transform scientific data into actionable information usable in downstream applications for decision making. 

EarthCODE actively supports initiatives across the Earth system sciences by providing practical development, code and data management tools, and an overall open science framework. One such example is the creation of analysis-ready data (ARD) cubes for the Antarctica Insync initiative. This resulted in FAIRification process to make complex data readily available for modelling (e.g. https://discourse-earthcode.eox.at/t/antartica-insync-data-cubes/107) and visualization (e.g. https://esa-earthcode.github.io/polar-science-cluster-dashboard/). By pre-integrating these diverse datasets, EarthCODE removes the burden of complex data engineering (such as reprojection and resampling), allowing downstream users to immediately apply these inputs to environmental monitoring and decision-making systems. Other examples of this support from EarthCODE can be seen with published datasets such as WAPOSAL and SMART-CH4 and others, enabling research outputs to be translated into actionable, accessible, relevant datasets. On top of that, to facilitate the bank of examples was developed to demonstrate good data management practices and encourage collaboration across scientific teams (https://esa-earthcode.github.io/documentation/Community%20and%20Best%20Practices/).   

FAIR data collections such as the one above and many more value-added geophysical products are made available by EarthCODE through its Open Science Catalog (https://opensciencedata.esa.int) which provides harmonized access to wide range of products across all Earth system science domains. While many catalogues prioritise openness and access, EarthCODE goes beyond by focusing on FAIRness. EarthCODE leverages open-source geospatial technologies like stac-browser, pycsw, PySTAC, OpenLayers  and others - while also contributing back to these projects in terms of software and standardization. The osc python library complements the OSC by providing a programmatic interface to search for and access catalogued research data for analysis.