ABSTRACT

AWS Amazon Web Services CLiPS Cloud-based LiDAR processing system CPU Central processing unit EC2 Elastic Compute Cloud EOSDIS Earth Observing System Data and Information System GIS Geographic information system GPGPU General-purpose computing on graphics processing

units GPU Graphics processing unit HPC High-performance computing HTC High-throughput computing IaaS Infrastructure as a service MODIS Moderate-Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer OCC Open Cloud Consortium OGC Open Geospatial Consortium PaaS Platform as a service Saas So¬ware as a service TIN Triangulated irregular network UAV Unpiloted aerial vehicles USGS U.S. Geological Survey VPN Virtual private network WMS Web Map Service

During the past four decades, scienti¦c communities around the world have regularly accumulated massive collections of remotely sensed data from ground, aerial, and satellite platforms. In the United States, these collections include the U.S. Geological Survey’s (USGS) 37-year record of Landsat satellite images (comprising petabytes of data) (USGS, 2011); the NASA Earth Observing System Data and Information System, having multiple data centers and more than 7.5 petabytes of archived imagery (Hyspeed Computing, 2013); and the current NASA systems that record approximately 5 TB of remote-sensing-related data per day (Vatsavai et al., 2012). In addition, new data-capture technologies such as LiDAR are used routinely to produce multiple petabytes of 3D remotely sensed data representing topographic information (Sugumaran et  al., 2011). Ÿese technologies have galvanized changes in the way remotely sensed data are collected, managed, and analyzed. On the sensor side, great progress has been made in optical, microwave, and hyperspectral remote sensing with (1) spatial resolutions extending from kilometers to submeters, (2) temporal resolutions ranging from weeks to 30  min, (3) spectral resolutions ranging from single bands to

Acronyms and De¦nitions .................................................................................................................553 27.1 Introduction .............................................................................................................................553