Ready for take-off: Earth Observation Cloud Credits Programme Updates

News / 24 July 2019

Discover the winning projects and status updates from the newly launched Earth Observation Cloud Credits Programme.

Last month, the Group on Earth Observations (GEO) and Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced the winners of the Earth Observation Cloud Credits Programme.

21 projects from 17 developing countries were awarded $1.5 million USD worth of cloud services, grants and technical support dedicated to helping researchers use, access, store and manage Earth observation (EO) data.

Following the conclusion of the review process,  grantees have started making use of their credits over the past few weeks to support their projects using EO for sustainable environmental and social development.

There has also been additional support from the Sinergise Sentinel Hub Credits programme, who have provided access to the repository of data from the Sentinel-2 Earth observation mission from the European Union’s Copernicus Programme that acquires optical imagery at high spatial resolution.

Sinergise is a software development company focused on cloud-based geographic information systems (GIS). It works to simplify the process of archiving, processing and distributing satellite imagery by integrating data into any desktop, web or mobile mapping application. Several of the projects have begun to use their software grants in addition to the Amazon Web Services.

The AWS grants provide eligible applicants up to $100,000 of credits for cloud services to help host, process and analyse large geospatial data sets for non-commercial purposes, prioritizing projects that make use of open satellite data. View the original news article for more details.

Discover the range of innovative projects in the table below.

Projects that are underway are hyperlinked to the proposals as submitted. We will be adding and updating the list as others complete the review process and begin to use the cloud computing credits.

Awarded projects

Title	Institution	Country	Using Sentinel Hub
Brazilian Earth Observation Data Cube using AWS for Land Use and Cover Change	National Institute for Space Research (INPE)	Brazil
Fire Monitoring Service	Tsinghua University/China	China
A Global Modeling Tool for Nature’s Contributions to People in Sustainable Development	Ministry of Environment and Energy	Costa Rica
Filtered Alert Hub Toolset	Cairo University, Electronics and Electrical Communications Engineering Department	Egypt
Computing Groundwater Potential in Arid and Semi-arid parts of Ethiopia.	Ministry of Water, Irrigation and Energy	Ethiopia
Capacity Building on Monitoring of SDGs	Remote Sensing and Climate Center Ghana Space Science and Technology Institute	Ghana
Integrating Earth Observation Data with Censuses and Sample Surveys to Estimate Development Indicators for India	Indian Institute for Human Settlements	India
AWS4AgriSAR-Crop inventory mapping from SAR data on cloud computing platform	Centre of Studies in Resources Engineering (CSRE) Indian Institute of Technology Bombay	India
Global Mobile Tsunami Warning System using Amazon Web Sever—A Life-Saving Platform	Ikatan Ahli Tsunami Indonesia, Tsunami Research Foundation	Indonesia
agriBORA - Geodata for actionable farm intelligence	Kenya Agricultural and Livestock Research Organization (KALRO)	Kenya
EO For Sustainable Development	National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI, Mexico)	Mexico/Colombia
South Asian drought monitoring and outlook system to support agricultural advisory processes	ICIMOD	Nepal
Operational monitoring system of ground deformations in Nigeria	Department of Geoinformatics and Surveying, University of Nigeria	Nigeria
Spatial Agricultural Intelligence	African Regional Institute for Geospatial Information Science and Technology (AFRIGIST)	Nigeria
Implementation of a service of information to monitor the degradation of Zones Marino Coastal	Ministry of Environment / Direction of Monitory and Evaluation of the Natural Resources of the Territory.	Peru
Automation of processes in the cloud, for the generation of mosaics of annual satellite images free of clouds, to contribute in the generation of information on changes in forest cover.	National Program for the Conservation of Forests for the Mitigation of Climate Change of the Ministry of the Environment of Peru	Peru
Air Quality Forecasting for Africa	Kigali Collaborative Research Center (KCRC)	Rwanda
AfriCultuReS Decision Support System (ADSS) Community Version	South African National Space Agency	South Africa
Methodology for SDGs indicators assessment	Space Research Institute NAS Ukraine and SSA Ukraine	Ukraine
Deep Learning for Satellite Monitoring of Illegal Amber Mining in Ukraine	Kharkiv National University	Ukraine
Monitoring Rice Paddy and Flood in the Lower Mekong Basin	HCMC Space Technology Application Center	Vietnam