ENABLING AIR QUALITY MONITORING WITH THE OPEN DATA CUBE: IMPLEMENTATION FOR SENTINEL-5P AND GROUND SENSOR OBSERVATIONS

Abstract. Nowadays, the amount of open geospatial data delivered e.g. by private and public entities, such as environmental agencies, enables outstanding possibilities to any user interested in investigating real-world phenomena. However, the availability of such information presents several challenges in terms of its practical use. These are mainly connected to the heterogeneity of data sources, formats and processing tools which have to be mastered by the user to obtain the desired results. As a relevant example, air quality monitoring requires the integration of multiple data with different spatial and temporal granularities that are often distributed by more than one provider using not uniform formats and access methods. Besides traditional air pollution ground sensors observations, novel data sources have emerged. Among them, the Sentinel-5P mission of the European Copernicus Programme is one of the most recent Earth Observation platforms providing estimates of air pollutants with daily global coverage. These estimates are promising to foster air quality analysis and monitoring by complementing ground sensors observations. Therefore, the development of data handling and analysis strategies – allowing users for a smooth integration of satellite and ground sensor observations – is key to support future air quality studies. To that end, the present work investigates the use of the Open Data Cube as a single data endpoint to incorporate ground sensors and satellite observations into local air pollution analyses. A preliminary implementation is presented using the Lombardy region (Northern Italy) as a case study.