News DEA Tech Alerts

Six of Australia’s offshore territories now covered by Digital Earth Australia baseline satellite data.

Digital Earth Australia is expanding the coverage of our satellite data to include six Australian offshore territories, including islands in the Torres Strait. This expansion supports the management of Australia’s Marine Parks, Ocean Ecosystem Accounting and Indigenous communities in the Torres Strait.

DEA is extending baseline satellite data to include:

• Christmas Island
• Cocos (Keeling) Islands
• Coral Sea Islands
• Heard Island and McDonald Islands
• Norfolk Island
• Islands in the Torres Strait

Further details.

Digital Earth Australia is trialling several datasets on the Google Earth Engine (GEE). This will allow users to combine DEA data with the many other datasets available on GEE and enable innovative ways to build new information products in future.

The DEA datasets include:

• Geometric Median and Median Absolute Deviation (GeoMAD)
• National Intertidal Digital Elevation Model 25m
• Water Observations Statistics
• Land Cover

Further details.

DEA will soon be releasing an updated version of the Geometric Median and Median Absolute Deviation products. This version (v4.0.0) will sit alongside the existing version (v3.1.0) for a couple of months to allow users to transition versions.

Further details.

The Terra and Aqua satellite missions are approaching their end of life and support for them is ramping down.

New MODIS Hotspots data will soon become unavailable.

When’s it happening?

Users are encouraged to begin transitioning to alternative Hotspots products as soon as possible.

New MODIS Hotspots data may stop arriving into DEA Hotspots as soon as July 2023.

Which services are affected?

• DEA Hotspots

What does this mean for DEA Users?

With MODIS coming to an end, an alternative is the daily VIIRS-based hotspots. In addition, the Himawari-8 hotspots offer updates approximately every 15 minutes.

The archive of MODIS hotspots over the last 20 years will continue to be served.

For more information visit:

Terra | The EOS Flagship (nasa.gov)

What’s happening?

Users may have encountered an unplanned outage on the Digital Earth Australia Sandbox.

DEA has implemented a solution as we continue to investigate the cause of the problem.

DEA Sandbox users are warned to expect intermittent issues over the next 12 hours.

For more information, please see the DEA Tech Alert

If you would like to contact DEA, please email earth.observation@ga.gov.au

Duplicate Sentinel-2 Level 1 (s2 l1) and Analysis Ready Data (ARD) has been discovered. The duplicate groups have the same region code and datetime attribute.

Background

Remediation will require archiving the duplicate scenes of our Sentinel-2 Level 1 (s2 l1) and Analysis Ready Data (ARD) products.

Further details.

Which Products are affected?

• S2b
• S2a

What does this mean for DEA Users?

This is expected to have minimal impact on users.

If you have any further questions or encounter issues, please contact earth.observation@ga.gov.au

Sentinel-2 ARD error – GQA failing over coastal scenes

Many Sentinel-2 Analysis Ready Data (ARD) coastal scenes up until March 2023 were produced without geometric quality assessment (GQA) information.

This error was found and fixed in the ARD processing code, however there are data errors present within existing coastal ARD produced prior to March 2023.

Background

GQA (Geometric Quality Assessment) metadata provides information about the georeferencing accuracy of each satellite observation.

Sentinel-2 ARD coastal scenes produced before March 2023 are missing GQA information, leading to low quality ARD outputs.

To correct the issue, we plan to archive and remove 26,037 Sentinel-2 ARD coastal scenes that have no GQA data.

Archiving and removing the scenes with no GQA will lead to good ARD being produced.

Which Products are affected?

• ga_s2am_ard_3
• ga_s2bm_ard_3
• Affected scene regions:
• '56JNR', '53HMC', '52HDK', '50KQD', '50HQG', '52LEL', '55GDM', '54HUE', '56HLG', '51HWC', '53HKE', '52HCK', '56JNP', '50HLG', '52LCK', '53LQG', '52LFM', '52HGK', '55GBQ', '54HVC', '56JNQ', '55HFU', '49KHS', '55HGU', '50HNG', '50HPG', '53LLH', '56HLH', '55GEM', '50HMG', '52LEK', '54HUD'

What does this mean for DEA Users?

Coastal ARD scenes before March 2023 that have no GQA data will be temporarily unavailable. They will be replaced with new ARD scenes with GQA data.

Users who have previously accessed Sentinel-2 ARD over coastal areas and filtered by GQA may wish to re-run their workflows to account for the updated data.

If you have any questions about the above, please email us at earth.observation@ga.gov.au

JMA Himawari satellites are switching their input data from Himawari-8 (AHI-8) to Himawari-9 (AHI-9); the 'GA' AHVRR algorithm layer is being removed from DEA Hotspots.

The DEA Hotspots computed from the Japanese Meteorological Agency (JMA) Himawari satellites are switching their input data from Himawari-8 (AHI-8) to Himawari-9 (AHI-9). This impacts the Landgate AHI and BRIGHT AHI algorithms.

The main cutover will take place on 13 December 2022.

Further information on the AHI-p switch-over and the removal of the 'GA' AHVRR algorithm is available here.

21 Dec, 2022 - The DEA CMI has been restored

17 Dec, 2022 - The DEA CMI is undergoing an unscheduled maintenance and all pages are unavailable at this time.

Analysis Ready Data Outage - Landsat 8 definitive data now available; issue being monitored

12 Sept, 2022 - Issue corrected.

19 Aug, 2022 - DEA unable to download and process Landsat 8 ARD definitive data.

Analysis Ready Data Outage - Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function now available; issue being monitored

1 Sept, 2022 - Issue corrected; collections expected to be back to normal by 9 Sept, 2022.

19 July, 2022 - DEA prevented from producing final versions of datasets for world-leading ARD products.

The Digital Earth Australia Intertidal product suite provides annual continental-scale elevation and exposure products for Australia’s intertidal zone, mapped at a 10 m resolution from our open-source Landsat and Sentinel-2 satellite data.

DEA Intertidal products have been used across government and industry to help better characterise and understand this complex zone that defines the interface between land and sea.

Learn more.

Digital Earth Australia has made our new DEA Waterbodies 3.0 product available for use. Please begin integrating DEA Waterbodies 3.0 into your existing workflows.

Get ready for the new DEA Knowledge Hub and CMI Decommissioning

The DEA Knowledge Hub will be the central location to find all Digital Earth Australia’s existing content, including our User Guides, Data Products and DEA Notebooks.

The DEA Knowledge Hub will bring together the how-to guides on our products and services, as well as the details on how to analyse our data using Jupyter notebooks.

Learn more

We’ve released a major update to the DEA Tools Python package, including new tools for pansharpening Landsat data, tide modelling, sunglint masking , interactive mapping and spatial operations.

The release includes 14 new and updated Jupyter notebooks, as well as new case studies focusing on fire, wetland and water quality mapping.

DEA Tools version 0.3.0 and all updated notebooks are now available automatically on the DEA Sandbox. For detailed information about new features and changes, see the version 0.3.0 release notes.

DEA Bushfire Burnt Area NRT Services is a new DEA self-service satellite analysis that allows users to see bushfires in the landscape and investigate recent burnt areas and fire scarring.

This DEA service allows users to visualise the Australian landscape and identify active bushfire events and delineate burnt areas. It can then provide insights to other data sources about how bushfire could threaten communities and property.

Find out more about this NRT service.

DEA’s Sentinel 2 ARD product (Surface Reflectance) upgrade from C1 to C3 nears completion

Upgrade will bring the packaging of the Sentinel ARD product in line with GA’s Landsat C3, implement a maturity concept to simplify the user experience and supply a Sentinel specific cloud mask.

Learn more