Swedish Space Data Lab

Bakground

Space data is now used in a wide range of fields. It is indispensable for weather forecasts and monitoring the climate, among other things, but it is also extremely important for forestry, agriculture and other fields in which up-to-date information about vegetation and the land surface is needed.

Purpose

The Swedish Space Data Lab (former National Space Data Lab) will be a national knowledge and data hub for Swedish authorities' work on earth observation data and for the development of AI-based analysis of data, generated in space systems. The purpose is to increase the use of data from space for the development of society and industry and for the benefit of the globe. The goal is to get data, technology and methodology in place to systematically develop services and applications that use space data in the data lab.

By the Space Data Lab we create a national infrastructure for exploitation of space data in order to increase the possibilities of developing smart and effective AI solutions for everything from storage of space data to how you can manage constellations of satellites in orbit.

The users of the data lab will be primarily public authorities with responsibility for civil, environmental and natural resources.

A national resource to Satellite data

The Space Data Lab uses the Open Data Cube (ODC) platform which is an open source project for geospatial data analysis that organizes the data into an efficient database structure and has python based API for querying data. ODC support third party tools like NumPy, Matplotlib, Pandas, Shapely, TensorFlow, PyTorch and allows for Space data science using popular Jupyter notebooks web-based interactive computational envrionment that mixes code, documentation, mathematical mark-up and images.

The Open Data Cube contains Copernicus data, primarily Sentinel-2 as of today but will overtime facilitate Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-3 and potentially additional data sources. Sentinel-2 data samples 13 spectral bands: four bands at 10 metres, six bands at 20 metres and three bands at 60 metres spatial resolution. The satellites high revisit frequency over Swden provides new data every 2-3 days. The data is designed to be modified and adapted by users interested in thematic areas such as:

• Spatial planning
• Agro-environmental monitoring
• Water monitoring
• Forest and vegetation monitoring
• Land carbon, natural resource monitoring
• Global crop monitoring

The users of the data lab will be primarily public authorities with responsibility for civil, environmental and natural resources, but the data lab will over time be available to everything from large forestry companies to individual farmers and private persons.

The Space Data Lab mission

• Make space data easy accessible and contribute to innovations and applications based on space data 
• Make data, processing capacity, software platforms & tools and methodology available to lower the threshold
• Enable systematic development of services and applications based on space data
• Create new possibilities – based on a real time, true situational awareness
• Increase the pre-requisites for developing countries as well as technically advanced countries