Cloud Data and Computing Services Allow Regional Environmental Assessment:A Case Study of Macquarie-Castlereagh Basin, Australia

Large amounts of data at various temporal and spatial scales require terabyte(TB) level storage and computation, both of which are not easy for researchers to access. Cloud data and computing services provide another solution to store, process, share and explore environmental data with low costs, stronger computation capacity and easy access. The purpose of this paper is to examine the benefits and challenges of using freely available satellite data products from Australian Geoscience DataCube and Google Earth Engine(GEE) online data with time series for integrative environmental analysis of the Macquarie-Castlereagh Basin in the last 15 years as a case study. Results revealed that the cloud platform simplifies the procedure of traditional catalog data processing and analysis. The integrated analysis based on the cloud computing and traditional methods represents a great potential as a low-cost, efficient and user-friendly method for global and regional environmental study. The user can save considerable time and cost on data integration. The research shows that there is an excellent promise in performing regional environmental analysis by using a cloud platform. The incoming challenge of the cloud platform is that not all kinds of data are available on the cloud platform. How data are integrated into a single platform while protecting or recognizing the data property, or how one portal can be used to explore data archived on different platforms represent considerable challenges.