Description
Planet's mission is to image the surface of the Earth every day. With over 140 Earth observation satellites currently in orbit imaging over 100 million square kilometers of land area per day, we are approaching that goal and expect to achieve it later this year. With a data pipeline built with open source tools, we process terabytes of data every data and manage an archive of petabytes.
Abstract
Global mosaics are created from Planet satellite images at regular intervals (quarterly, monthly, and weekly) by selecting the best quality scenes (e.g. cloud- and haze-free), color balancing, and seamlessly compositing millions of scenes to create continuous maps of the Earth for each time slice. As our data rate increases, we are scaling up the cadence of our mosaics, and plan to build a continuously updated "dynamic" mosaic of the most recent cloud-free images of the Earth. Daily data at 5 meter spatial resolution will open up new analysis techniques previously limited by the temporal or spatial resolution of existing instruments.