Release Notes

We are excited to launch WorldDEM™ from Airbus. Hailed as "The New Standard for Global Elevation Models", WorldDEM™ brings UP42 users a Digital Surface Model (DSM) with pole-to-pole coverage, high accuracy, and consistency.

WorldDEM™ is based on radar satellite data acquired during the TanDEM-X Mission, which had the primary goal of generating a high-quality DSM of the entirety of the Earth's surface, based on SAR interferometry.

The goal of the mission was clearly achieved with all 148.5 million km² of the Earth's surface being captured in the space of four and half years, driving consistency in the generated DSM and global coverage. The elevation models' accuracy is evident, with the Absolute Vertical Accuracy and Absolute Horizontal Accuracy being <4m and <6m, respectively.

For more information about WorldDEM™ and its use cases, check out the following video:

Access the WorldDEM™ block

This new processing block from Terra Cover enables you to create a robust surface water extent map using a deep neural network. This allows you to visualize the presence and area of a lake or reservoir for your area of interest. The approach of generating surface extent maps are significantly less impacted by atmospheric disturbances compared to traditional index-based thresholding methods, ensuring the accuracy of the reservoir and lake surface is higher.

The model first checks for the presence of a lake or reservoir using Terra Cover’s time series data set, also available on UP42. The pre-check ensures that you don’t spend money or time on computationally-intensive deep learning models when there is no presence of water within your area of interest. The block also automatically utilizes the s2cloudless cloud mask to minimize the disruption of clouds in your analysis.

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Viewshed from Intermap provides the line-of-sight from any point, height, radius, and azimuth on an elevation model. The model outputs a GeoTIFF, with the pixels visible from the point of origin are in green, while the pixels not visible from the point of origin are in red (see below).

Viewshed is primarily used in the telecommunications industry to evaluate the reach of signals from telecom transmitters. To ensure signal strength is uninterrupted, telecommunications providers must place communicating transmitters within each others' line of sight, avoiding buildings, trees, and terrain. As such, viewshed is the perfect tool to analyze and optimize signal strength.

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The latest version of the SDK reflects the changes previously announced for the UP42 console. Firstly, you can now order data without running a workflow, whether that data is available directly or needs to be ordered from the OneAtlas archived storage. Orders can now be created using the Catalog.place_order command.

Secondly, you can now reuse your purchased OneAtlas imagery through the Python SDK by specifying your asset ID in the Workflow.construct_paramaters command. This enables you to access and process data that is currently in your user storage.

Running geospatial analytics at scale requires powerful computing infrastructure. Indeed, as most geospatial developers are painfully aware, complex algorithms can take hours or even days to train or analyze large areas of interest.

With an expanding range of increasingly complex machine-learning algorithms available on the UP42 marketplace, it is incumbent upon us as a company to ensure we continue to provide an efficient infrastructure for such analysis.

As such, we now provide block builders with new options for larger CPU machines with 8 or 16 cores and 40 or 80 GB RAM and a GPU machine type - GPU P100 - to increase performance.

These new machine types will reduce job runtime significantly, ensuring you get the insights you need promptly. We've also significantly reduced the infrastructure costs associated with all our machine types making using UP42 for complex analysis more affordable.

We've radically expanded the amount of SPOT and Pléiades available through UP42 by enabling the collection of scenes in the OneAtlas Archived Storage.

This brings much more consistency to our OneAtlas coverage and provides you with more options for many AOIs. For example, you can now choose between 2.7 times more scenes in the US than were previously available.

Flood and Water Finder from the UP42 team generate a binary water or flood mask from Pléiades or SPOT imagery. This enables you to run analysis on SPOT or Pléiades imagery omitting water bodies or flooded areas from your analysis.

Alternatively, you can convert your output into a vector file to use the water body or flooded area as an area-of-interest for any water-related analysis.

The Water Finder generates a GeoTIFF output highlighting the presence of water on a single SPOT or Pléiades image. Alternatively, the Flood Finder generates a similar output but looking at the area of water that is not present in an initial SPOT or Pléiades image but is present in a subsequent image.

Use the Water Finder | Use the Flood Finder

Basemaps act as a layer upon which you can overlay geospatial information and visualize information within its broader context. This essential component of many geospatial analyses is now available through UP42 with sharp, consistent, and fresh imagery from OneAtlas.

This block provides 1.5 m SPOT imagery globally and 0.5 m Pléiades imagery for major urban areas. The data can be downloaded and streamed from UP42 in GeoTIFF format.

Download block | Streaming block

Detecting oil on the ocean surface and differentiating between natural oil seepage and oil slicks is essential for oil exploration companies.

Developed over 20 years, Airbus has collated a global oil seep database covering 76 million sq km. It is updated yearly with new areas and updates on existing areas. This database acts as an invaluable cost-effective risk ranking tool for the OGME industry.

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You may recall that we implemented our user storage functionality last month, which enabled the seamless delivery of tasked imagery. We're building on that functionality and are happy to announce that any SPOT and Pléiades imagery you purchase through our download blocks will now be automatically accessible through your user storage.

Within the user storage, you'll find the data's asset_id that you can use when configuring a job to reuse the data as many times as you'd like.