摘要：Climate-related changes have already been observed at various spatial and temporal scales,along with frequent extreme climate events and emerging issues in great complexity.Meanwhile, the impacts of climate change are expected to become increasingly more severefor more people and places as the amount of warming increases. However, great challengesand uncertainties exist in understanding climate change and its complex impacts, largely dueto the limited availability and compatibility of large-scale data. Climate change research isbased on multiple parameters, using global datasets that cover long time periods and thathave increasingly finer temporal and spatial resolutions. As data volumes continuouslyexpand and more parameters are considered in climate modeling and analysis, traditionalspatial data management and analysis is reaching a bottleneck. There is, therefore, an urgentneed to make use of big data and cloud computing to allow more integrated investigationsand a synthesis of the complex changes in the climate in the context of Earth systems. BigEarth data empowered by Earth observation technology has great potential for use in theintegrated analysis of climate change at global and regional scales and for supporting aninformed response by human society to common challenges such as climate warming,extreme climate and weather, and climate-related disaster risks.
