About

About the ESA Charter Mapper

To better support Charter Project Managers (PM) and Value Adders (VA) in the context of activations, COS-2 has been augmented with a processing environment, i.e., a suite of on-line EO-based services that is called the ESA Charter Mapper. It is able to access and display EO data, perform visual analysis, apply GIS functionalities and to perform EO-based processing to extract geo-information from imagery.

Since September 2021, the ESA Charter Mapper is available to support operations. It is intended to ease access and use of the EO data during an activation. EO data received from the Charter members and partners through COS-2 are automatically ingested and transformed as full-resolution browse EO images. The PMs and VAs can browse imagery, filter and select the EO data of interest, analyze and process them online with EO-based services and toolboxes. They can use the ESA Charter Mapper to create ad-hoc composites of different spectral bands to optimize the signal to the type of hazards and to observe changes across time as the activation develops.

Automated processing executed in the background whenever new EO data is provided, allows PMs and VAs to immediately operate pre-processed data, reducing their workload. However, the generation of information products (Value-Added Products) requires supervision from experts and remains the responsibility of the VAs and PMs.

The idea of an on-line processing environment finds its origin in 2017. The Charter started a reflection about a complete on-line processing environment that would ease access and use of EO data during Charter operations, considering also the strong increase of EO data provided for each activation (often hundreds of images) by the Charter member agencies. Back in 2017, ESA proposed a prototype of a Processing Environment with basic online services, like the visualization and screening of full-resolution EO data. Based on ESA’s proposition, the Charter defined the guidelines for exploiting such capability and all the procedures required from testing to operations. Other Charter members are also taking the initiative and are proposing other Processing Environments.

For further information about the ESA Charter Mapper please consult the Frequently Asked Questions.

The ESA Charter Mapper is operated by Terradue with the support of the consortium led by Eversis.

Current ESA Charter Mapper release: v1.11

User manual credits

The ESA Charter Mapper online documentation is developed and maintained by Terradue with the support of the consortium.

Author: Mauro Arcorace (Terradue)

Contributors: Fabrice Brito, Francesco Cerasuolo, Fabio Zingaretti, Enguerran Boissier, Emmanuel Mathot, Fabrizio Pacini (Terradue), Marco Chini (LIST), Philippe Bally (ESA).

Version: 0.5.2

Last update: 28 March 2024