Very high spatial resolution imagery at the heart of the Geospatial Cloud Computing Qëhnelo™ system: Application to Pleiades data in New Caledonia

New Caledonia is an archipelago in the south-west of the Pacific Ocean. It concentrates the main particularities of Pacific Island countries: islands surrounded by a lagoon closed by coral reefs and covered by typical vegetation; and they are exposed to littoral risks (hurricane, tsunami, climate change, sea level rise) (Mimoura, 1999). Remote sensing data from earth observation satellites constitutes one of the major sources of environmental information. During the last 40 years, the quality, precision, coverage and repetitiveness of the remote sensing data have been constantly improved. The Pleiade constellation offers since 2012 the ability to collect tri-stereoscopy mutlispectral data at 70 cm resolution from which the potential to provide valuable information to decision makers was assessed concerning the mangroves monitoring, soil erosion mapping and hurricane and tsunami vulnerability evaluation. Then, the key challenge is therefore to provide decision makers with the right information at the right time and in a user-friendly manner. Cloud computing technology allows the development of web based platforms which are able to connect to scattered databases to exploit data, perform scientifically-based data analysis and modeling processes. Based on the environmental geospatial cloud computing concept, the Qëhnelö plateform allows the combination of remote sensing data and spatial analysis with any other remote database to assess the environment under social and industrial constraints and monitor the risks in an allin-one package for effective decision-making by non-specialists.