News DEA Tech Alerts

Six of Australia’s offshore territories now covered by Digital Earth Australia baseline satellite data.

Digital Earth Australia is expanding the coverage of our satellite data to include six Australian offshore territories, including islands in the Torres Strait. This expansion supports the management of Australia’s Marine Parks, Ocean Ecosystem Accounting and Indigenous communities in the Torres Strait.

DEA is extending baseline satellite data to include:

• Christmas Island
• Cocos (Keeling) Islands
• Coral Sea Islands
• Heard Island and McDonald Islands
• Norfolk Island
• Islands in the Torres Strait

Further details.

Digital Earth Australia is trialling several datasets on the Google Earth Engine (GEE). This will allow users to combine DEA data with the many other datasets available on GEE and enable innovative ways to build new information products in future.

The DEA datasets include:

• Geometric Median and Median Absolute Deviation (GeoMAD)
• National Intertidal Digital Elevation Model 25m
• Water Observations Statistics
• Land Cover

Further details.

DEA will soon be releasing an updated version of the Geometric Median and Median Absolute Deviation products. This version (v4.0.0) will sit alongside the existing version (v3.1.0) for a couple of months to allow users to transition versions.

Further details.

What’s happening?

Users may have encountered an unplanned outage on the Digital Earth Australia Sandbox.

DEA has implemented a solution as we continue to investigate the cause of the problem.

DEA Sandbox users are warned to expect intermittent issues over the next 12 hours.

For more information, please see the DEA Tech Alert

If you would like to contact DEA, please email earth.observation@ga.gov.au

Duplicate Sentinel-2 Level 1 (s2 l1) and Analysis Ready Data (ARD) has been discovered. The duplicate groups have the same region code and datetime attribute.

Background

Remediation will require archiving the duplicate scenes of our Sentinel-2 Level 1 (s2 l1) and Analysis Ready Data (ARD) products.

Further details.

Which Products are affected?

• S2b
• S2a

What does this mean for DEA Users?

This is expected to have minimal impact on users.

If you have any further questions or encounter issues, please contact earth.observation@ga.gov.au

Sentinel-2 ARD error – GQA failing over coastal scenes

Many Sentinel-2 Analysis Ready Data (ARD) coastal scenes up until March 2023 were produced without geometric quality assessment (GQA) information.

This error was found and fixed in the ARD processing code, however there are data errors present within existing coastal ARD produced prior to March 2023.

Background

GQA (Geometric Quality Assessment) metadata provides information about the georeferencing accuracy of each satellite observation.

Sentinel-2 ARD coastal scenes produced before March 2023 are missing GQA information, leading to low quality ARD outputs.

To correct the issue, we plan to archive and remove 26,037 Sentinel-2 ARD coastal scenes that have no GQA data.

Archiving and removing the scenes with no GQA will lead to good ARD being produced.

Which Products are affected?

• ga_s2am_ard_3
• ga_s2bm_ard_3
• Affected scene regions:
• '56JNR', '53HMC', '52HDK', '50KQD', '50HQG', '52LEL', '55GDM', '54HUE', '56HLG', '51HWC', '53HKE', '52HCK', '56JNP', '50HLG', '52LCK', '53LQG', '52LFM', '52HGK', '55GBQ', '54HVC', '56JNQ', '55HFU', '49KHS', '55HGU', '50HNG', '50HPG', '53LLH', '56HLH', '55GEM', '50HMG', '52LEK', '54HUD'

What does this mean for DEA Users?

Coastal ARD scenes before March 2023 that have no GQA data will be temporarily unavailable. They will be replaced with new ARD scenes with GQA data.

Users who have previously accessed Sentinel-2 ARD over coastal areas and filtered by GQA may wish to re-run their workflows to account for the updated data.

If you have any questions about the above, please email us at earth.observation@ga.gov.au

The Digital Earth Australia Geometric Median and Median Absolute Deviation (DEA GeoMAD) products use statistical analyses to provide information on variance in the landscape over the given year. They provide insight into the “average” conditions observed over Australia, as well as the amount of variability experienced around that average.

As part of an upcoming set of improved Landsat derivative releases DEA GeoMAD 4.0 is now available. Version 3.1.0 will be decommissioned on 2nd September 2024. Please ensure that you have migrated to the new services before this date. See below on the various access links to aid in your migration.

Learn more.

The Digital Earth Australia Intertidal product suite provides annual continental-scale elevation and exposure products for Australia’s intertidal zone, mapped at a 10 m resolution from our open-source Landsat and Sentinel-2 satellite data.

DEA Intertidal products have been used across government and industry to help better characterise and understand this complex zone that defines the interface between land and sea.

Learn more.

Digital Earth Australia has made our new DEA Waterbodies 3.0 product available for use. Please begin integrating DEA Waterbodies 3.0 into your existing workflows.