Commercial satellite providers produce somewhere between 100 and 200 terabytes of imagery a day ̶ a monstrous amount of information. Sentinel 2 has five years of daily refresh data. We have 40+ years of Landsat data. It’s a massive amount, particularly in the temporal dimension, where you can do longitudinal studies. Apache Spark and Raster Frames might just be the tools we need to handle this much data.

With the open data movement, there’s an ubiquity of data. We can let students pick their own data on topics that interest them. They find their own data for a geographic area they’re interested in, perhaps where they live or where they’d love to travel. They make connections to their own interests and lives. The more they’ll see the relevance of what they’re learning, the more they’re motivated.