European Space Agency Digital Twin Earth (DTE) Framework: GRID4EARTH
This project, funded by the European Space Agency (ESA), aims to improve the organisation, storage, and processing of large volumes of satellite data.
We are developing a new global data structure for handling Earth observation data from Sentinel satellites and the Destination Earth (DestinE) initiative. The approach is based on a Discrete Global Grid System (DGGS), which divides the Earth into a consistent grid, making satellite data easier to manage, compare, and analyse across regions and time.
The project combines the HEALPix global grid system with modern cloud-friendly storage technology (Zarr V3) to enable more efficient data access and processing. It will ensure compatibility with the widely used WGS84 coordinate system and define clear metadata standards so that datasets can be shared and reused more easily.
A key outcome of the project will be a fully documented workflow that allows this new grid-based data format to be integrated into existing Sentinel data processing systems without reducing performance or data quality.
More information:
Our role in GRID4EARTH
GRID4EARTH is carried out by a European consortium of IFREMER, CNRS, the University of Tartu, GEORODE and LifeWatch ERIC. Our lab provides general expertise and advice on DGGS to the consortium, based on our work on DGGS and OGC API – DGGS. In the course of the project, we also supported the technical reporting around DGGS impact assessments, workflow refinements, performance analyses, and comparison results on Sentinel-2 and Sentinel-3 data subsets in the HEALPix DGGS, which assesses the technical challenges and performance of integrating HEALPix-based data into the Sentinel processing workflows.
Open-source tools
The project develops an open-source HEALPix tool stack on the WGS84 ellipsoid, including the following:
- healpix-geo, core HEALPix coordinate algorithms for the geosciences;
- healpix-resample, regridding of (lon, lat) data onto HEALPix with GPU-accelerated nearest-neighbour and PSF interpolation;
- xdggs, the Xarray extension for DGGS.
The project is funded by the European Space Agency.
More information regarding the project
Principal investigator: Alexander Kmoch
Project period: 30.04.2025−30.10.2026
