DEA Tech Alerts Outages, Updates & Releases

17 April 2024 - Digital Earth Australia is trialling several datasets on the Google Earth Engine (GEE). This will allow users to combine DEA data with the many other datasets available on GEE and enable innovative ways to build new information products in future.

The DEA datasets include:   

• Geometric Median and Median Absolute Deviation (GeoMAD) 
• National Intertidal Digital Elevation Model 25m  
• Water Observations Statistics  
• Land Cover

Find out more here. 

15 Feb 2024 - DEA will soon be releasing an updated version of the Geometric Median and Median Absolute Deviation products. This version (v4.0.0) will sit alongside the existing version (v3.1.0) for a couple of months to allow users to transition versions.

Further details are available here. 

The Terra and Aqua satellite missions are approaching their end of life and support for them is ramping down.

New MODIS Hotspots data will soon become unavailable.

When’s it happening?  

Users are encouraged to begin transitioning to alternative Hotspots products as soon as possible.

New MODIS Hotspots data may stop arriving into DEA Hotspots as soon as July 2023.

Which services are affected?     

• DEA Hotspots

What does this mean for DEA Users? 

With MODIS coming to an end, an alternative is the daily VIIRS-based hotspots. In addition, the Himawari-8 hotspots offer updates approximately every 15 minutes.

The archive of MODIS hotspots over the last 20 years will continue to be served.

For more information visit:

Terra | The EOS Flagship (nasa.gov)

Resolved: Unplanned outage - DEA Sandbox

What’s happening?  

Users may have encountered an unplanned outage on the Digital Earth Australia Sandbox.

DEA has implemented a solution as we continue to investigate the cause of the problem.

DEA Sandbox users are warned to expect intermittent issues over the next 12 hours.

For more information, please see the DEA Tech Alert 
 
If you would like to contact DEA, please email earth.observation@ga.gov.au 

Removal – Sentinel-2 Level 1 and ARD duplicates 

Duplicate Sentinel-2 Level 1 (s2 l1) and Analysis Ready Data (ARD) has been discovered. The duplicate groups have the same region code and datetime attribute. 

Background 

Remediation will require archiving the duplicate scenes of our Sentinel-2 Level 1 (s2 l1) and Analysis Ready Data (ARD) products. 

Further details are available here. 

Which Products are affected? 

• S2b 

• S2a 

What does this mean for DEA Users? 

This is expected to have minimal impact on users. 

If you have any further questions or encounter issues, please contact earth.observation@ga.gov.au 

Sentinel-2 ARD error – GQA failing over coastal scenes 

Many Sentinel-2 Analysis Ready Data (ARD) coastal scenes up until March 2023 were produced without geometric quality assessment (GQA) information.  

This error was found and fixed in the ARD processing code, however there are data errors present within existing coastal ARD produced prior to March 2023.  

Background 

GQA (Geometric Quality Assessment) metadata provides information about the georeferencing accuracy of each satellite observation.  

Sentinel-2 ARD coastal scenes produced before March 2023 are missing GQA information, leading to low quality ARD outputs.  

To correct the issue, we plan to archive and remove 26,037 Sentinel-2 ARD coastal scenes that have no GQA data. 

Archiving and removing the scenes with no GQA will lead to good ARD being produced.  
 

Which Products are affected? 

• ga_s2am_ard_3 

• ga_s2bm_ard_3 

• Affected scene regions:  

• '56JNR', '53HMC', '52HDK', '50KQD', '50HQG', '52LEL', '55GDM', '54HUE', '56HLG', '51HWC', '53HKE', '52HCK', '56JNP', '50HLG', '52LCK', '53LQG', '52LFM', '52HGK', '55GBQ', '54HVC', '56JNQ', '55HFU', '49KHS', '55HGU', '50HNG', '50HPG', '53LLH', '56HLH', '55GEM', '50HMG', '52LEK', '54HUD' 

 
What does this mean for DEA Users? 

Coastal ARD scenes before March 2023 that have no GQA data will be temporarily unavailable. They will be replaced with new ARD scenes with GQA data. 

Users who have previously accessed Sentinel-2 ARD over coastal areas and filtered by GQA may wish to re-run their workflows to account for the updated data.  

If you have any questions about the above, please email us at earth.observation@ga.gov.au 

JMA Himawari satellites are switching their input data from Himawari-8 (AHI-8) to Himawari-9 (AHI-9); the ' GA' AHVRR algorithm layer is being removed from DEA Hotspots. 

The  DEA Hotspots computed from the  Japanese Meteorological Agency (JMA) Himawari satellites are switching their input data from Himawari-8 (AHI-8) to Himawari-9 (AHI-9). This impacts the Landgate AHI and BRIGHT AHI algorithms.

The main cutover will take place on 13 December 2022. 

Further information on the AHI-p switch-over and the removal of the ' GA' AHVRR algorithm is available here.

CMI Outage – The DEA Content Management Interface (CMI) is undergoing maintenance 

21 Dec, 2022 - The DEA CMI has been restored

17 Dec, 2022 -  The DEA CMI is undergoing an unscheduled maintenance and all pages are unavailable at this time.

Background

The DEA CMI is undergoing an unscheduled maintenance with the expected date of completion 21 December, 2022.  

Which Products are affected?

• DEA CMI

What does this mean for DEA Users?

People accessing the DEA CMI will be greeted by the following message:  
 

'CMI is down for maintenance. It will be back online by the 21st December 2022. We apologise for the inconvenience. 
 
'If you would like to contact DEA, please email earth.observation@ga.gov.au' 

Upon maintenance completion users will have access to the CMI pages as usual.  

If you have any questions about the above please email us at earth.observation@ga.gov.au

Analysis Ready Data Outage - Landsat 8 definitive data now available; issue being monitored

12 Sept, 2022 - Issue corrected. 

19 Aug, 2022 -  DEA unable to download and process Landsat 8 ARD definitive data. 

Background

DEA accesses Landsat data from the United States Geological Survey (USGS), which we process into our Analysis Ready Data (ARD). The data feed from USGS that provides DEA with Landsat 8 level 1 T1/T2 data has had no new data since 25th August 2022. We have reported this issue to the USGS and are working with them to resolve it.

DEA has not been able to download and process Landsat 8 ARD definitive data with a satellite acquisition date later than since the 19th August 2022.

We will advise when this data feed will be restored.

Which Products are affected?

• Landsat 8 definitive Surface Reflectance 
• Landsat 8 definitive data feeds into: 
  • DEA Water Observations (Water Observations from Space)
  • DEA Waterbodies
  • Fractional Cover

Note: Statistical products such as DEA Water Observations annual summaries and Fractional Cover Percentiles will be unaffected by the outage. 

What does this mean for DEA Users?

The Landsat 8 data feed will be back processed as soon as the issue is resolved. Data is still available from Sentinel 2 during this time.

We will provide an update to this notice when we have a clearer timeline on restoring the Landsat 8 data feed.

If you have any questions about the above please email us at earth.observation@ga.gov.au

Analysis Ready Data Outage - Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function now available; issue being monitored

1 Sept, 2022 - Issue corrected; collections expected to be back to normal by 9 Sept, 2022. 

19 July, 2022 - DEA prevented from producing final versions of datasets for world-leading ARD products. 

Background

One of the key inputs to DEA’s Analysis Ready Data algorithms - Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function (BRDF) - has been unavailable since 19th July.  This has prevented DEA from producing final versions of datasets for our ARD products.

We have rolled back to a simplified ARD production method to ensure continuity in data availability.  Unfortunately, this simplified method increases uncertainty in the accuracy of our products slightly.

However, for most applications this change will go unnoticed.

Which Products are affected?

• Landsat Surface Reflectance
• DEA Water Observations (Water Observations from Space)
• DEA Waterbodies
• Fractional Cover

Note: Statistical products such as DEA Water Observations annual summaries and Fractional Cover Percentiles will be unaffected by the outage. 

What does this mean for DEA Users?

We recommend that if you have any major statistical analyses you intend to perform as a one-off, you consider whether you can wait for the definitive product to become available. Otherwise, continue as you were.

Once our BRDF data feed is back up and running we’ll replace affected products with the definitive data. We expect to have our collections back to normal by 9 September.

If you have any questions or feedback please email us at earth.observation@ga.gov.au

The Digital Earth Australia Intertidal product suite provides annual continental-scale elevation and exposure products for Australia’s intertidal zone, mapped at a 10 m resolution from our open-source Landsat and Sentinel-2 satellite data.  
 
DEA Intertidal products have been used across government and industry to help better characterise and understand this complex zone that defines the interface between land and sea.    

Learn more.

New release | DEA Waterbodies 3.0

Digital Earth Australia has made our new DEA Waterbodies 3.0 product available for use. Please begin integrating DEA Waterbodies 3.0 into your existing workflows. 

Learn more

Get ready for the new DEA Knowledge Hub and CMI Decommissioning

The DEA Knowledge Hub will be the central location to find all Digital Earth Australia’s existing content, including our User Guides, Data Products and DEA Notebooks. 
The DEA Knowledge Hub will bring together the how-to guides on our products and services, as well as the details on how to analyse our data using Jupyter notebooks.

Learn more

We’ve released a major update to the DEA Tools Python package, including new tools for pansharpening Landsat data, tide modelling, sunglint masking, interactive mapping and spatial operations.
 
The release includes 14 new and updated Jupyter notebooks, as well as new case studies focusing on fire, wetland and water quality mapping.   

DEA Tools version 0.3.0 and all updated notebooks are now available automatically on the DEA Sandbox. For detailed information about new features and changes, see the version 0.3.0 release notes.