The Urban TEP - Utilizing Multi-Source Data for Innovative Urban Analysis and Monitoring

Urbanization and climate change, representing two of the most relevant developments related to the human presence on the planet, challenge our environmental, societal and economic development. Over the past two decades, cities have become the global economic platforms for production, innovation and commerce. At the same time they act as focal points of social developments. The availability of and access to accurate, detailed and up-to-date information will impact decision making processes all over the world. The Copernicus Sentinel satellites and the free and open access data policy of the European Space Agency (ESA) contribute to a spatially and temporally detailed monitoring of the Earth’s surface. At the same time a multitude of additional sources of open geo-data is available - e.g. from national or international statistics or land surveying offices, volunteered geographic information or social media. Based on these developments, the capability to effectively and efficiently access, process, and jointly analyze the mass data collections poses a key technical challenge. The Urban Thematic Exploitation Platform (U-TEP) is developed to provide end-to-end and ready-to-use solutions for a broad spectrum of users to extract unique information/ indicators required for urban management and sustainability. Key components of the system are an open, web-based portal connected to distributed high-level computing infrastructures and providing key functionalities for i) high-performance data access and processing, ii) modular and generic state-of-the art pre-processing, analysis, and visualization, iii) customized development and sharing of algorithms, products and services, and iv) networking and communication. EO-based processing has been used generate several global thematic layers, including the Global Urban Footprint (GUF 2012) binary human settlement mask, several collections of TimeScan products providing spectrally and temporally harmonized representations of the land surface, and the experimental GUF-DenS 2012 product. In addition, several (global) auxiliary data sets have been integrated, including demo data for High Altitude Pseudo Satellites (HAPS), WorldPop, Gridded Population World, Global Administrative Units, VIIRS Nighttime Lights, ESA CCI Land Cover, World Bank statistics, UN statistics and geotagged Tweets. U-TEP provides the possibility to define and conduct on-demand processing and production of individual thematic content based on multi-mission remote sensing imagery and above mentioned data sources. The complementary data might either be publically available on the platform or individually uploaded by the user. For processing and data analysis, U-TEP provides high-level processing solutions and high-performance IT-infrastructures, which support large-scale and near-real-time data exploitation. For the development of own content or applications, U-TEP offers interfaces to upload and run user-defined algorithms and processes and provides functionalities to develop own methods and products (e.g., the functionalities of the Sentinel tool boxes). In the first project phase, which covered the time span from March 2015 to March 2018, already more than 300 institutions from more than 40 countries of diverse users (i.a. from science, public institutions, NGOs, industry) have requested Urban TEP products, services and system access. This indicates that U-TEP meets the expectations of the user community. The intended follow-up funding phase will last 4 years, in which the platform will enter the operational phase.