Chair: Sinan Deger, California Institute of Technology/IPAC
Paul Morin, Director, Polar Geospatial Center, University of Minnesota
The confluence of large volumes of readily accessible, high-resolution satellite observations, increasingly sophisticated software and continued growth in the capability of high-performance computing (HPC) now enable the production of high-demand, timely, high-quality, global-scale, geospatial products. Recent, highly successful partnerships have produced transformative geospatial products including the ArcticDEM, Reference Elevation Model of Antarctica (REMA), and the NASA Goddard Sahil Treecount Project, demonstrate the high return on investment achieved from providing collaborative teams of geospatial scientists and software engineers with access to large volumes of high resolution, high-frequency data, and efficient high-performance computing and services. Going forward, these projects offer the potential to deliver transformative new capabilities in the realms of artificial intelligence and machine learning, as well as efficient traditional methods, to dramatically improve the automated extraction of information from imagery over large areas and at high resolution and through time. Potentially, this will open an entirely new capability for a high-resolution understanding of a changing earth in many dimensions.