Earth Search is Element 84’s free, cloud-native catalog that makes public Earth observation data—like Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2—discoverable, analysis-ready, and open to all. This talk will share an in-depth update on the current state of Earth Search, the pipelines that power it, and our recent work to ensure long-term stability and transparency.

We’ll cover how the team has taken over the Sentinel ingestion pipeline on AWS, tackled metadata gaps and ingestion bugs, and improved the catalog’s coverage and accuracy. Attendees will learn how the pipeline generates Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFFs and rich STAC metadata that follows current best practices and extensions—making advanced cloud-native workflows possible.

We’ll also discuss our plans to open source the entire Earth Search processing stack, explain how the community can benefit from and contribute to it, and share progress on addressing known gaps in the Sentinel-2 archive. From debugging broken asset links to filling missing scenes and deprecating legacy collections, this talk will give a transparent look at the challenges of maintaining a massive, open geospatial archive—and what’s next as we continue to expand reliable, standards-based access for everyone.