Earth Observation – EUMETVIEW the EUMETSAT satellite gallery

For more than a decade, GeoSolutions has partnered with EUMETSAT to evolve EUMETView, its operational Earth Observation visualization platform. Used daily by National Meteorological Services, researchers, and operational forecasting centers, EUMETView provides intuitive access to satellite imagery and derived products from across the EUMETSAT mission portfolio. Over the years, GeoSolutions has helped transform EUMETView from its original implementation into a modern, scalable, standards-based platform, designed to handle ever-growing data volumes, increasing timeliness requirements, and the demand for richer, interactive exploration tools.

EUMETView at work

The Challenge

EUMETView must deliver three capabilities simultaneously: interactive visualisation (fast map tiles and animations), programmatic access (APIs for query and download), and reliable full-resolution data delivery, while supporting heavy and bursty traffic. The platform needs to handle multi-dimensional time data and complex projections, plus support both operational near-real-time publishing and historical exploration at scale. The operational requirements translate into millions of requests per day, high concurrency and strict availability needs.

Our approach

We designed a scalable, automated platform focused on robustness, performance and operational simplicity, running in a K8s private cluster:

• Scalable GeoServer clusters & automation: EUMETView runs multiple GeoServer instances in parallel , with fully automated DEV / INT / VAL / OPE pipelines, ensuring repeatable deployments and quick rollbacks.
• Advanced tile caching & delivery: a MapCache layer backed by Memcached, cache-cleaning services and edge caching (Varnish) to serve tiles and animations efficiently while keeping origin load low.EUMETSAT – EumetView Operations…
• Time and multidimensional support: custom extensions for time-series management (timeslider, WMTS multidim) and “nearest match” rules for multi-granule datasets that enable fluid animations and fast time queries.
• Smart data housekeeping & pinning: a pinning / housekeeping service and GeoServer plugin that prevents critical data used in visualisations from being removed (pinning behaviour across GeoServer services), plus cleaners for MapCache and ImageMosaic. These facilities keep the system responsive while allowing safe background purging of obsolete data.
• Robust data ingestion & indexing: ingestion pipelines for a wide variety of EO inputs (NetCDF/GRIB/COG), sidecar/histogram stores, netCDF indexing and partitioning to guarantee fast queries and downloads.
• Resilient storage & DB design: A PostgreSQL cluster managed with the Zalando operator and PgPool for high availability and predictable query performance is operated.

Operational model

EUMETView is delivered as a fully automated set of environments with continuous integration and IV&V support; regular IV&V and maintenance cycles are included in the ongoing support plan, covering items such as system updates and adapting to infrastructure changes (e.g., replacement of middleware).

Impact and key results

GeoSolutions’ work on EUMETView delivered both immediate operational capacity and longer-term strategic flexibility. By combining horizontal scale, domain-aware GeoServer enhancements, intelligent caching and robust operational automation, the platform now supports production EO visualisation and distribution at a scale and reliability required by national meteorological services and the wider scientific community. The improvements have not only enabled responsive, interactive user experiences and high-throughput programmatic access, but they also created a maintainable operational model that reduces risk as new missions and data formats are introduced

Here below some of the key results of this work.

• High throughput and scale: the platform regularly handles millions of requests per day (typical averages ~5M/day; peaks up to ~10M/day) and thousands of daily users.
• Low-latency interactive visualisation and animations. Custom time-series support and “nearest-match” rules let users animate multi-granule datasets and browse time dimensions fluidly, delivering the snappy interactive experience required for operational forecasting and exploratory analysis.
• Reliable full-resolution downloads and programmatic access. The platform supports robust discovery and download workflows, including full-resolution exports, backed by ingestion, indexing and sidecar/histogram stores that make downloads predictable and performant for large EO products.
• Operational stability: automated pipelines and clustered services reduce operational risk and improve predictability across DEV/INT/VAL/OPE.
• Extensibility: modular GeoServer customisations and ingestion patterns allow new mission products (e.g., CO₂M and H-SAF layers) to be added quickly and safely

Taken together, these results show that EUMETView now combines production-grade scale and responsiveness with an operational model that makes the platform maintainable and extensible,  a capability baseline that supports today’s operational needs and positions the service for future missions and data types.

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