Speakers Bio & Abstract

Abstract Big Data for a Big Country: The Australian Geoscience Data CubeAbstract: Geoscience Australia, in collaboration with CSIRO and the National Computational Infrastructure have developed an innovative capability to measure and monitor the Australian land surface at unprecedented scale. The unique combination of high performance computing, big-data mining techniques and new satellite observing capabilities is allowing us to liberate the huge archive of satellite observations over Australia collected over the last 35 years to deliver up-to-date time series of environmental change at high resolution, over the entire continent. This allows us measure and track the pattern of surface water and flood inundation during wet and dry years, follow the growth in farm dams in the Murray Darling Basin, track the development of open cut mining, measure coastal change and coastal bathymetry, and track the patterns of land clearing and irrigated cropping at an individual paddock scale across all of Australia through a common environmental data infrastructure. The development of this technology provides a capability to develop objective, evidence based measurement and monitoring of environmental change in a much more cost effective, efficient and accessible way across entire continents and shows the potential for a global infrastructure of such tools for governments interested in the development, mapping, regulation and management of land, water and coastal activities.