Fofanaᅠᅠᅠᅠᅠᅠᅠᅠᅠᅠᅠᅠᅠᅠᅠᅠᅠᅠᅠᅠᅠᅠᅠᅠᅠᅠᅠᅠᅠᅠᅠᅠᅠᅠᅠᅠ

Studying the Earth involves more time downloading files than analysing them. The European Space Agency holds 90 petabytes of planetary data, and they just fundamentally changed how anyone interacts with it. For years, working with Copernicus Sentinel data meant pulling massive files from SAFE archives. You had to store them locally, install mission-specific software, and navigate formats built before cloud computing existed. If you wanted to check a single scene for cloud cover, you couldn't just glance at it. You paid a massive upfront cost in time and hard drive space. That era is now over. ESA's transitioning Sentinel data to Zarr, a cloud-native format that treats data as an API instead of a static file. So ESA has now launched the EOPF Sentinel Zarr Explorer. Everything happens directly from cloud storage. You don't download a single megabyte of raw data to your machine. The workflow starts with discovery. The platform uses STAC, meaning you browse the massive catalogue using open community standards. You locate the exact coordinates and timeframes you need instantly. Then you look at the data. You can load a Sentinel-1 radar or Sentinel-2 optical scene right in your web browser. Analysis happens in the exact same environment through openEO Studio. You write Python code in your browser, define a processing graph, and execute it. A researcher can track algal blooms in the Venice Lagoon by computing a Normalised Difference Chlorophyll Index, and the result appears instantly as an interactive map. The barrier between a hypothesis and a working environmental analysis is now just a few lines of code. The developers actively avoided building a walled garden. They collaborated directly with the wider community to establish modular geospatial conventions. Because they built on open standards, desktop tools like QGIS and libraries like GDAL can read the exact same data without any proprietary plugins. Anyone with a web browser can now run analyses that used to require a dedicated computational lab.

Satellite imagery can now predict how people commute across cities. No surveys. No mobile phone data. Just freely available images from Sentinel-2 and Landsat:

J'écoute Makaveli, et à tous ceux qui soutiennent souvent que 2pac est le meilleur rappeur de l'histoire, je tiens à dire que très sincèrement, je vous comprends. C'est peut-être vous qui aviez raison tout ce temps. Je ne suis même pas au 5e titre 🥴🥴🥴