Earth Analytics Science and Innovation platform (EASI)
CSIRO’s EASI technology is a high-performance data analytics platform that leverages the power of cloud computing to enable researchers to process and integrate data, working on larger scales and at greater speeds.
EASI is helping our scientists and partners to accelerate research including:
- Landscape mapping and modelling
- Water quality monitoring
- Crop and pasture management
- Geophysics
- Climate analyses and more!
For example, a CSIRO team has used EASI to combine two decades of high-resolution Earth observation data, from multiple sources to measure degradation in water quality concurrently at state, estuary, and offshore scales, correlating events like floods with sediment plumes 30 km off the coast. These findings help government and local managers set policies and reduce risk for industries in the blue economy.
Increasing access and scale
Earth observation data provides important information about changes to the land, water and atmosphere that enable us to understand the Earth’s systems, how the Earth is changing, what causes these changes and the impacts of our actions. But constant monitoring and observing of the Earth means there are massive volumes of data that need to be efficiently stored while remaining easily accessible to anyone, anywhere.
EASI builds upon the Open Data Cube, which we developed in partnership with Geoscience Australia, and which employs cloud computing to manage vast amounts of Earth observation data allowing users to skip complex data management and pre-processing and instead focus on unlocking value.
EASI captures the advantages of the Open Data Cube, plus opportunities presented by other recent developments in global geospatial and Earth observation data distribution including Xarray, machine learning software, the Committee on Earth Observation Satellites Analysis Ready Data standard, cloud-native data formats, and the Spatio-Temporal Asset Catalog (STAC) for discovery.
EASI combines these with CSIRO’s scientific expertise and high-performance, high-scalability tools like Kubernetes and Dask, enabling continental-scale processing, increased productivity, reduced costs, and accelerated innovation that takes research advances from the lab to industry and government.
We manage EASI as infrastructure for Earth observation science for internal and external partners including commercial customers. The platform also underpins a number of our international capability building activities in Southeast Asia and beyond.
Benefits
Benefits of using CSIRO’s EASI platform include:
- Data discovery and integration is simplified.
- Customisable analysis workflow supports diverse business models – ie. choose your data, your algorithm, your parameterisation.
- ‘Paddock to Planet’ scalable data analysis and scenario outputs – via cloud computing and automation you can explore the whole innovation landscape, to the limits of your time and expense budget.
- Access to Earth observation specialists and researchers in CSIRO who can assist industry and governments in developing new business products and ensuring their quality.
- Businesses can participate at lower upfront cost – subscribing to access and ‘pay per use compute’, to prove out new market opportunities.
- Removes costs of large-scale storage and compute infrastructure, data acquisition and data preparation ‘pain points’ for small companies.
