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This article presents a novel system that produces multiyear high-resolution irrigation water demand maps for agricultural areas, enabling a new level of detail for irrigation support for farmers and agricultural stakeholders. The system is based on a scalable distributed deep learning (DL) model trained on dense time series of Sentinel-2 images and a large training set for the first year of observation and fine tuned on new labeled data for the consecutive years. The trained models are used to generate multiyear crop type maps, which are assimilated together with the Sentinel-2 dense time series and the meteorological data into a physically based agrohydrological model to derive the irrigation water demand for different crops. To process the required large volume of multiyear Copernicus Sentinel-2 data, the software architecture of the proposed system has been built on the integration of the Food Security thematic exploitation platform (TEP) and the data-intensive artificial intelligence Hopsworks platform. While the Food Security TEP provides easy access to Sentinel-2 data and the possibility of developing processing algorithms directly in the cloud, the Hopsworks platform has been used to train DL algorithms in a distributed manner. The experimental analysis was carried out in the upper part of the Danube Basin for the years 2018, 2019, and 2020 considering 37 Sentinel-2 tiles acquired in Austria, Moravia, Hungary, Slovakia, and Germany.

This article presents TimeSen2Crop, a pixel-based dataset made up of more than 1 million samples of Sentinel 2 time series (TSs) associated to 16 crop types. This dataset, publicly available, aims to contribute to the worldwide research related to the supervised classification of TSs of Sentinel 2 data for crop type mapping. TimeSen2Crop includes atmospherically corrected images and reports the snow, shadows, and clouds information per labeled unit. The provided TSs represent an agronomic year (i.e., period from one year's harvest to the next one for agricultural commodity) ranging from September 2017 to August 2018. To generate the dataset, the publicly available Austrian crop type map based on farmer's declarations has been considered. To ensure the selection of reliable labeled units from the map (i.e., pure pixels correctly associated to their labels), an automatic procedure for the extraction of the training set based on a multitemporal deep learning model has been defined. TimeSen2Crop also includes a TS of Sentinel 2 images acquired in the following agronomic year (i.e., from September 2018 to August 2019). These data are provided with the aim of attract more research activities for solving a typical challenge of the crop type mapping task: adapting multitemporal deep learning models to different year (domain adaptation). The design of the dataset is described along with a benchmark comparison of deep learning models for crop type mapping.

Bringing together a number of cutting-edge technologies that range from storing extremely large volumes of data all the way to developing scalable machine learning and deep learning algorithms in a distributed manner and having them operate over the same infrastructure poses unprecedented challenges. One of these challenges is the integration of European Space Agency (ESA)'s Thematic Exploitation Platforms (TEPs) and data information access service platforms with a data platform, namely Hopsworks, which enables scalable data processing, machine learning, and deep learning on Copernicus data, and development of very large training datasets for deep learning architectures targeting the classification of Sentinel images. In this article, we present the software architecture of ExtremeEarth that aims at the development of scalable deep learning and geospatial analytics techniques for processing and analyzing petabytes of Copernicus data. The ExtremeEarth software infrastructure seamlessly integrates existing and novel software platforms and tools for storing, accessing, processing, analyzing, and visualizing large amounts of Copernicus data. New techniques in the areas of remote sensing and artificial intelligence with an emphasis on deep learning are developed. These techniques and corresponding software presented in this article are to be integrated with and used in two ESA TEPs, namely Polar and Food Security TEPs. Furthermore, we present the integration of Hopsworks with the Polar and Food Security use cases and the flow of events for the products offered through the TEPs.