“Digital Earth Africa is a ‘weapon of mass creation’ with the ability to place a wand in every hand - from policymaker to young professional - to improve life on earth using satellite remote sensing.”
So says Thando Mathe, a GIS consultant and co-founder of Spatial Sense Inc. a Zimbabwe-based technology start-up. Spatial Sense Inc. uses geospatial technology to improve lives in Africa by supporting sustainable development projects in land resource governance.
Digital Earth Africa can be used to access a wide range of spatial data across Africa. Learn how it can be used for searching data, finding location coordinates and analysing data with the Open Data Cube. Get started on the Digital Earth Africa Map here.
A cloud-free image of all of Africa produced by combining tens of thousands of satellite image collected throughout an entire year. The new AWS data centre in Cape Town stores millions of images, making these new products possible
Satellites have continually captured Africa’s land surface and coastlines for decades, but it has proven difficult to translate this into usable information. The key question Digital Earth Africa (DE Africa) has begun to answer is ‘how can we ensure that the vast amounts of data being captured by satellites is available, findable, accessible and suitable for use by as many users as possible?’ While there are vast amounts of free and open Earth observations (EO), the step to delivering impact is for the data to be more easily available.
We’re working to make Copernicus Sentinel-1 radar satellite data available in an analysis-ready format within the Digital Earth Africa platform by the end of 2020.
The Digital Earth Africa (DE Africa) platform now has operational analysis-ready Earth observation (EO) data over Africa, using free and open images captured by the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Sentinel-2 satellites. This is our first ever continuously updated satellite data at the continental scale for Africa.
As part of the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is supporting Digital Earth Africa (DE Africa). DE Africa is enabling African nations to track changes across the continent in unprecedented detail by making Earth observation (EO) data more easily accessible.
Digital Earth Africa will rely on analysis ready data to ensure efficient time-series analyses and data interoperability. A grand challenge for the Earth observation (EO) community is taking vast amounts of satellite data and turning it into decision-ready products that anyone can use. At a Big EO: Big Data side event as part of the Group on Earth Observation (GEO) Week 2019, a key discussion was the role data providers and aggregators play in addressing this challenge and the call for international coordination.