costeLAB: a cloud platform for monitoring activities and elements of coastal zones using satellite data

costeLAB is a pre-operative thematic cloud-type platform characterized by and specialized in the sector of geospatial services for coastal environment management. The platform integrates a large set of processors and algorithms and exploits multi-mission and multi-sensor Earth observation data, from the European and Italian Space Agencies’ missions, such as ESA Sentinels and Italian Space Agency (ASI)’s COSMO-SkyMed and (in future) PRISMA missions. It covers a broad range of application domains from emergency management in the event of sea storms, incidents of occasional pollution or instability of coastal landslides, to monitoring and protection of the territory. This platform, developed entirely with Open Source technologies, aims to provide various types of users, from both public and private organizations, a homogeneous environment equipped with a set of software tools to visualize, analyse and process data from multiple sources (Ground Truth, multi-mission Earth Observation, etc.) and with various dimensions (single observations, time series, etc.). Furthermore, costeLAB allows the generation and visualization of new products, providing scientific users with a collaborative environment for the development and testing of innovative algorithms in order to build and test new processing chains. The approach of the proposed architecture keeps computing resources close to data, i.e. by exploiting the access and processing capabilities typical of the cloud, costeLAB avoids the transfer of large amounts of data to the user. The platform is addressed to institutional, scientific and industrial users and allows the study, experimenting and developing new downstream pre-operational services for the monitoring of the coastal area environment. The platform has been designed and developed to run in a pre-operational context in the framework of "Progetto Premiale Rischi Naturali Indotti dalle Attivita Umana - COSTE", n. 2017-I-E.0, funded by the Italian Ministry of University and Research (MUR), and promoted and coordinated by ASI. The platform has been developed by e-GEOS S.p.A. and Planetek Italia with the participation of the National Research Council of Italy (CNR), Meteorological Environmental Earth Observation (MEEO) and Geophysical Applications Processing (G.A.P.) s.r.l. as subcontractors.