Redefining the possibility of digital Earth and geosciences with spatial cloud computing

Abstract

Global challenges (such as economy and natural hazards) and technology advancements have triggered international leaders and organizations to rethink geosciences and Digital Earth in the new decade. The next generation visions pose grand challenges for infrastructure, especially computing infrastructure. The gradual establishment of cloud computing as a primary infrastructure provides new capabilities to meet the challenges. This paper reviews research conducted using cloud computing to address geoscience and Digital Earth needs within the context of an integrated Earth system. We also introduce the five papers selected through a rigorous review process as exemplar research in using cloud capabilities to address the challenges. The literature and research demonstrate that spatial cloud computing provides unprecedented new capabilities to enable Digital Earth and geosciences in the twenty-first century in several aspects: (1) virtually unlimited computing power for addressing big data storage, sharing, processing, and knowledge discovering challenges, (2) elastic, flexible, and easy-to-use computing infrastructure to facilitate the building of the next generation geospatial cyberinfrastructure, CyberGIS, CloudGIS, and Digital Earth, (3) seamless integration environment that enables mashing up observation, data, models, problems, and citizens, (4) research opportunities triggered by global challenges that may lead to breakthroughs in relevant fields including infrastructure building, GIScience, computer science, and geosciences, and (5) collaboration supported by cloud computing and across science domains, agencies, countries to collectively address global challenges from policy, management, system engineering, acquisition, and operation aspects.

Keywords:

• EarthCube
• CloudGIS
• eScience
• Earth science
• interoperability

Acknowledgements

Research is supported by State Administration of Foreign Experts Affairs (20120464001), NSF (IIP-1160979 and CNS-1117300), FGDC (GeoCloud and GEOSS Clearinghouse), and Microsoft Research. Drs. Dennis Guo, Xiang Li, Ziyong Zhou, Yang Hong, Peng Yue, Rick Kim, Yong Liu, Qunying Huang, Min Chen, Xinyue Ye, and Santonu Goswami reviewed the manuscript. We sincerely thank Drs. Huadong Guo and Changlin Wang for inviting us to organize the special issue and facilitating the process of developing this special issue.