Technological Innovation and Emerging Operational Applications in Digital Earth

Dear Colleagues,

Data science has unanimously been recognized as a core driver for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations. Digital Earth can fully utilize data-driven technology to understand the inner mechanisms of the global environmental system as well as its impacts on economy and society. With the explosive growth of air–space–ground–sea integrated monitoring systems, the integrated observation platform of Digital Earth is developed to incorporate various active and passive microwave, visible, and infrared satellite remote sensing data sources as well as in situ observation sources. The size of observation data warehouses in Digital Earth systems is increasing sharply on terabyte, petabyte, and even exabyte scales. At the same time, with the rapid development of next-generation Earth simulators, the simulator platform of the Digital Earth is used to predict future environmental evolution and assess resulting social and societal impacts. Since more complex physical, chemical, and biological processes need to be included in higher-resolution modeling, increasing the resolution of Earth simulators by a factor of two means that about ten times as much computing power will be needed and results in the size of simulation data warehouses for Digital Earth also increasing sharply. Currently, emerging technologies, including data mining, deep learning, blockchain, cloud computing, and the internet of things, are being incorporated into Digital Earth. The Digital Earth is becoming a multidimensional, multiscale, multitemporal, and multilayered data-driven dynamic platform to model the Earth system, drive new geoinformation discoveries, and support social service issues within the three United Nations frameworks of sustainable development goals, climate change, and disaster risk reduction, as well as in the development of digital economies. This topic collection will provide an efficient and high-quality platform for promoting Digital Earth sharing, processing, mining, and analyses across the entire spectrum of Earth and environmental sciences, thereby revolutionizing the cognition of the Earth's systems.

Prof. Dr. Zhihua Zhang
Prof. Dr. M. James C. Crabbe
Topic Editors