Tackling EO Data with Ease

xcube is an Open Source software package for generating, managing and exploiting EO data cubes. The toolset has been developed to facilitate easy access to a vast amount of EO data in an analysis- ready fashion. It provides such data as grids in common spatio-temporal coordinate systems.
xcube is now the base of various affordable commercial as well as free services. It has been used for instance in CyanoAlert, a project funded within the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 program which helps addressing water quality concerns. In CyanoAlert, satellite images are analysed automatically to deliver tailored results and notifications via a simple-to-use web-based interface or a mobile app.

The above–mentioned project substantially benefits from xcube’s various features and interfaces: A Python client allows for creation and management of data cubes on the basis of EO data and other raster data. The xcube library builds on and extends the Python library xarray. In addition, xcube exploits the multi-threading capabilities of dask, a powerful library allowing for outsourcing threaded computations to a dedicated cluster in an almost configuration free manner.

The xcube viewer is the visually most appealing component of the software package. It uses the xcube WebAPI for accessing data cubes provided online in cloud infrastructures. The viewer gives instantaneous visual access to whole data cubes and fosters an explorative approach to large data sets. It impresses with performance and its outstanding developmental focus on usability.

If xcube has raised your interest, feel free to visit the CyanoAlert data cube viewer, the EODataBEE viewer, or the ESDL viewer. You may also give a try to Euro Data Cube, a one-stop service offering affordable data cube solutions for integrating EO and other data including non-gridded information.