Calvalus: Full-mission EO cal/val, processing and exploitation services

ESA's Earth Observation (EO) missions provide a unique dataset of observational data of our environment. Calibration, algorithm development and validation of the derived products are indispensable tasks for an efficient exploitation of EO data and form the basis for reliable scientific conclusions. In spite of its importance, the cal/val and algorithm development work is often hindered by insufficient means to access data, time consuming work used to identify suitable in-situ data matching the EO data, incompatible software and limited possibilities for a rapid prototyping and testing of ideas. In view of the amount of data produced by the future ESAs series of Sentinel satellites, a very efficient technological backbone is required to maintain the ability of ensuring data quality and algorithm performance. Brockmann Consult has developed such a backbone based on leading edge technologies within an ESA R&D study. Calvalus is a new processing system that utilises the map-reduce programming model with a distributed file system.