The poles play a huge part in regulating and driving the global climate, but they are also the regions experiencing the fastest rates of warming worldwide. Additionally, being sparsely populated but rich in natural resources is making their development increasingly interesting to politicians and industry. Developing tools to understand and monitor any environmental changes is vital to better predict and reduce the resulting global economic and environmental consequences.
As climate change progresses, environmental data covering the Arctic and Antarctic becomes ever more important. In these remote, harsh and often dark regions, it is very difficult to collect data from the ground. Instead, satellites provide the most consistent, repeatable, year-round and wide-coverage information. This, combined with the polar regions covering a third of Earth’s surface, makes polar researchers the biggest user group of Earth observation satellite data.
To support researchers, industry, local indigenous populations and regional and national governments, in 2015 ESA asked global organisation Polar View to develop a Thematic Exploitation Platform that would make data, tools and resources relevant to the polar regions available in one place. The platform is an online environment where anyone, anywhere, can access data, analytic tools, and high-performance processors to analyse the data.