Overview and Current State of the “ GEO ( Global Earth Observation ) Grid ”

The “GEO (Global Earth Observation) Grid” is aiming at providing an E-Infrastructure to understand our Earth more insightful and more precisely, but faster and easier to worldwide Earth Sciences community. On the E-Infrastructure we are able to share data, application programs, and scientific workflows without knowing deep knowledge in IT where the grid technology is provisioned. GEO Grid provides large archives of earth observation satellite data securely and rapidly, integrated service with wide variety of geo-scientific information and GIS data, and assembles them easy-to-use formats for potential stakeholders in not only disaster management but also other several Societal Benefit Areas. GEO Grid potentially contributes to provide IT as software package and large-scale of archived data related to the earth observation. The former enables to support securely for publishing data with incoherent owners’ policy, easy access, and distributed data provider. The latter contains the all ASTER archives and geological maps. In other words, GEO Grid has the capability to generate high-level data products (accurate geometric-, radiometricand atmospheric-corrected, and 30-meter and/or higher resolution DEM globally) by the Computing Grid.