High-Resolution Ocean Winds: Hybrid-Cloud Infrastructure For Satellite Imagery Processing

This paper puts forward a practical application of emergent cloud computing technologies that addresses issues encountered in the earth observation and meteorological domain. Ever increasing satellite capture technologies result in larger and larger data that is being processed by more and more complex algorithms for the generation of weather reports, forecasts, etc. Companies and researchers that work on this kind of processing chains struggle with storage and computing issues that cloud computing technologies can overcome. This kind of architecture becomes all the more relevant as cloud providers propose accessible pay-per-use services that make such infrastructure economically viable. This article relates the complexity of satellite data processing with the solutions that cloud computing can offer. It details use cases that highlight the need for a centralized access to data between processing resources with localization constraints, for scalable storage and distributed computing capabilities, and for hardware optimization to minimize both costs and processing time.