Digital Earth Australia

Digital Earth Australia (DEA) is a program of Geoscience Australia, an Australian Government agency, established in 2018 to turn satellite observations into consistent, analysis-ready data for the whole continent. Imagery captured at different times, seasons and conditions is hard to compare, so DEA orthorectifies and corrects Landsat (5, 7, 8 and 9) and Sentinel-2 imagery into DEA Surface Reflectance. It then builds national products on top of it: Water Observations and Waterbodies, Land Cover, Fractional Cover, GeoMAD annual composites, Coastlines (satellite data combined with tidal modelling, annually since 1988), Intertidal, Mangrove Canopy Cover and Fuel Moisture Content. DEA Hotspots detects fires from MODIS, VIIRS and Himawari-9 observations, and a near-real-time service maps burnt areas from Sentinel-2.

Products are free and released under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. Users reach them through the DEA Maps web viewer, WMS and WCS web services for GIS tools such as QGIS, a STAC API, Cloud Optimised GeoTIFFs in a public AWS S3 bucket in Sydney, the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI), and the DEA Sandbox, a JupyterLab environment for Australian government and education users. The platform runs on the open-source Open Data Cube, and the DEA Knowledge Hub publishes documentation, notebooks, validation reports and tech alerts.

Geoscience Australia reports that DEA datasets have helped raise New South Wales' capacity for water governance by 500 per cent, that Cibo Labs uses DEA data to help graziers manage more than 20 million hectares, and that DEA Waterbodies feeds the monthly NSW Seasonal Conditions Outlook. Victoria's Country Fire Authority is trialling DEA Waterbodies to inform where it positions its firefighting aircraft.