EarthCODE – ESA’s Earth Science Collaborative Open Development Environment

Abstract

Earth Observations (EO) have become crucial for advancing climate and Earth System research, enabling significant scientific discoveries. Advanced EO missions, such as ESA’s Earth Explorers and the EU's Copernicus Programme, provide vast data volumes and continuous and global observations with cutting-edge technology, a vital resource for understanding processes and interactions within Earth's sub-systems, offering critical evidence of climate change impacts on society and ecosystems. Open access to such data products has been instrumental in facilitating global scientific collaboration and innovation. Reproducibility in Earth Science is essential for validating discoveries, enabling the scientific community to trust and build upon each other’s work. Open data, coupled with open-source software, is key to achieving this reproducibility, ensuring transparency, and facilitating peer review. Addressing scientific challenges requires collaborative efforts supported by fit-for-purpose technology to enable new insights and ensuring they are FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable), trustable and up to date, supporting long-term climate studies and action-driven science. Several initiatives within ESA’s Earth Observation Programme are fostering FAIR and Open Science. EarthCODE is one such initiative, focusing on implementing ESA’s vision of EO Open Science and Innovation by adopting FAIR and Open principles in Earth Science activities funded by ESA’s FutureEO Programme. EarthCODE leverages existing European platform solutions for effective cloud-based analyses of EO data and higher-level geospatial products. It aims to ensure the persistence of end-to-end scientific workflows and provide means for managing open research data, including data, code, and documentation. EarthCODE aims to make Earth Science research more reproducible, transparent, and collaborative, driving progress in understanding and addressing global environmental challenges.