Representing Earth remote sensing data as time series

Abstract

To date, all remote sensing data are represented and stored as temporal sequences of separate “snapshots” – rasters or grids. This makes impossible to quickly obtain a time series of a variable values for the full available period for a region of a coordinate grid. Trend research – one of the most important topics in Earth science – becomes extremely complex and time consuming. This paper proposes an alternative data representation and corresponding storage technique. The data are represented as a collection of individual time series, one per each grid cell or raster pixel. New storage layout enables any time series to be always readily accessible. This approach considerably facilitates the application of existing time series techniques to remote sensing, climate reanalysis and similar data as well as provides new research and development opportunities not available before.