A portal offering standard visualization and analysis on top of an open data cube for sub-national regions: The Catalan data cube example

© 2019 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. The amount of data that Sentinel fleet is generating over a territory such as Catalonia makes it virtually impossible to manually download and organize as files. The Open Data Cube (ODC) offers a solution for storing big data products in an effcient way with a modest hardware and avoiding cloud expenses. The approach will still be useful up to the next decade. Yet, ODC requires a level of expertise that most people who could benefit from the information do not have. This paper presents a web map browser that gives access to the data and goes beyond a simple visualization by combining the OGC WMS standard with modern web browser capabilities to incorporate time series analytics. This paper shows how we have applied this tool to analyze the spatial distribution of the availability of Sentinel 2 data over Catalonia and revealing differences in the number of useful scenes depending on the geographical area that ranges from one or two images per month to more than one image per week. The paper also demonstrates the usefulness of the same approach in giving access to remote sensing information to a set of protected areas around Europe participating in the H2020 ECOPotential project.