Exploring of Heterogeneous Earth-Observation Data Archives using Enriched Metadata and Data Mining Tools

Since modern imaging sensors continuously deliver enormous amounts of data. The extensive availability of high and very high resolution images is not only exploding the volumes of acquired data but also brings unavailable image detail, thus fantastically growing the information content. As for example ENVISAT provided measurements of the atmosphere, ocean, land, and ice over 10 years of operations generating a data archive that reaches many petabytes. TerraSAR-X contains an extensive data archive of more than 100,000 scenes covering the majority of the Earth's surface. In 2010, a second, almost identical to TerraSAR-X satellite was launched, the TanDEM-X (TerraSAR-X add-on for Digital Elevation Measurement). Since then both satellites started the synchronous data acquisition and completed the first coverage of the Earth's entire landmass within only 13 months. In the coming years, the Sentinels (1-5) will be launched contributing with data for land monitoring, e.g. imagery of vegetation, soil and water cover, inland waterways and coastal areas, etc