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Implementation of the Australian Water Observations from Space (WOfS) Algorithm in Africa and South America using the CEOS Data Cube

Created 17/10/2025

Updated 17/10/2025

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In 2014 Geoscience Australia launched Water Observations from Space (WOfS) providing a continental-scale water product that shows how often surface water has been observed across Australia by the Landsat satellites since 1987. WOfS is a 23-step band-based decision tree that classifies pixels as water or non-water with 97% overall accuracy. The enabling infrastructure for WOfS is the Australian Geoscience Data Cube (AGDC), a high performance computing system organising Australian earth observation data into a systematic, consistently corrected analysis engine. The Committee on Earth Observation Satellites (CEOS) has adopted the AGDC methodology to create a series of international Data Cubes to provide the same capability to areas that would otherwise not be able to undertake time series analysis of the environment at these scales. The CEOS Systems Engineering Office (SEO) recently completed testing of WOfS using Data Cubes based on the AGDC version 2 over Kenya and Colombia. The results show how Data Cubes can provide water management information at large scales, and provide information in remote locations where other sources of water information are unavailable. The results also show an improvement in water detection capability over the Landsat CFMASK. This water management product provides critical insight into the behaviour of surface water over time and in particular, the extent of flooding. Presentation for the 49th American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting 2016

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Field Value
Title Implementation of the Australian Water Observations from Space (WOfS) Algorithm in Africa and South America using the CEOS Data Cube
Language eng
Licence Not Specified
Landing Page https://data.gov.au/data/dataset/3df11175-bbe6-40ba-aa07-a140302f7f32
Contact Point
Geoscience Australia Data
clientservices@ga.gov.au
Reference Period
Geospatial Coverage
Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors
{
  "coordinates": [
    [
      [
        112.0,
        -44.0
      ],
      [
        154.0,
        -44.0
      ],
      [
        154.0,
        -9.0
      ],
      [
        112.0,
        -9.0
      ],
      [
        112.0,
        -44.0
      ]
    ]
  ],
  "type": "Polygon"
}
Data Portal Geoscience Australia

Data Source

This dataset was originally found on Geoscience Australia "Implementation of the Australian Water Observations from Space (WOfS) Algorithm in Africa and South America using the CEOS Data Cube". Please visit the source to access the original metadata of the dataset:
https://ecat.ga.gov.au/geonetwork/srv/eng/csw/dataset/implementation-of-the-australian-water-observations-from-space-wofs-algorithm-in-africa-and-sou