WEkEO 2.0 Platform Contract Finalized

A contract for the operation of the WEkEO 2.0 platform has been finalized between Thales Alenia Space and the European Organization for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT), representing the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), Mercator Ocean International (MOI) and the European Environment Agency (EEA). Together called the WEkEO Partners, the consortium is responsible for the provision of cloud computing and related services for the WEkEO 2.0 platform.

“This new platform will embed major evolutions which will enhance WEkEO users experience, and will keep streamlining access to Copernicus, EUMETSAT and WEkEO partners data and products."

Bertrand Denis, Thales Alenia Space.

This system will replace the current WEkEO Data Information and Access Services (DIAS) financed by the European Commission and will provide a fast, secured streamline access to data and products from Europe’s Copernicus Earth observation program and other Environmental Services.

The WEkEO platform is an important gateway to harnessing the power of key environmental space-based data. Not only does it provide free and open access to data from the Sentinel constellation, as well as data and products from the four Copernicus Services focused on environmental data (marine, atmosphere, climate and land), it also provides free (and paid) access to powerful virtual processing environments that allow users to transform data. Entrepreneurs, researchers or any interested citizen can use the WEkEO platform to develop an added-value application, develop models and transform data, or simply explore Copernicus space-based data and data derived from in situ technology and models.

WEkEO 2.0 Platform Succeeds Version 1

The WEkEO v1 platform has been in operation since 2019 and has been deployed over three countries in Europe (Germany, Italia and Poland) mixing private and public cloud infrastructures. The WEkEO 2.0 contract provides for the replacement of WEkEO v1 by a brand-new, state-of-the-art WEkEO 2.0 platform, providing continuity and stability of the WEkEO services for the years to come. It covers the “as a service” provisioning of the computing, storage and network virtual infrastructure as well as data access and hosted processing capabilities. The new platform will offer enhanced capabilities to the WEkEO users, such as Serverless functions allowing to perform on-demand processing close to the data and also, the hybridization with High Performance Computing (HPC) allowing to perform complex and massive high speed data processing. Thales Alenia Space promises a smooth transition to current WEkEO users to the new platform by the end of 2023.

“This new platform will embed major evolutions which will enhance WEkEO users experience, and will keep streamlining access to Copernicus, EUMETSAT and WEkEO partners data and products," said Bertrand Denis, VP Observation & Science Domain at Thales Alenia Space. "Completing our Space systems offering by cutting-edge solutions on Ground Segments is a key element of our growth strategy in the domain of Earth Observation, and we are proud to have EUMETSAT’s trust in this approach.”

(Source: Thales Alenia Space news release. Images provided)