The Norwegian National Ground Segment; Preservation, Distribution and Exploitation of Sentinel Data

In order to take advantage of the Sentinel program, the Norwegian Space Agency decided to establish a national collaborative ground segment for satellite data with the purpose of simplifying data access, ensure support for operational national services and long term preservation of data. This is the NBS where MET Norway has the technical responsibility in terms of providing the infrastructure and storage capacity for data management. Serving the data through two separate platforms, the end users have access to the data in its original format in addition to Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 products in NetCDF-4/CF. Using the latter format, services like regridding, subsetting, visualization and aggregation are integrated utilizing OPeNDAP in combination with OGC WMS and OGC WPS. In addition, data uploading and retrieving operations are simplified for an end user since streaming of data by means of OPeNDAP is supported in multiple programming languages. Due to the strong coupling between space based earth observations, in-situ observation, model data etc, disseminating data in a generic data management system utilizing NetCDF-4/CF and OPeNDAP is convenient for seamless integration across branches. However, the current CF version is not mature for handling all parts of the Sentinel data but future development looks very promising.