Development plan for autocorrelation in georeferenced EO data

[rhugonnet]

Hi @shunt16 and @pdevis,

I am a researcher working with EO imagery and uncertainty analyses, and I am wondering if your current development plan includes the support for spatio-temporal auto-correlations in different coordinate reference systems? This is a feature that really seems key to EO these days (many researchers analyze the spatial/temporal sum/mean of a single type of observation in EO data without accounting for the fact that uncertainties are far from being independent).

If it is something that you think would fit well in obsarray, and you're looking for some help, I'd be happy to try to contribute! :smile: I am looking to code this consistently somewhere to apply to any type of EO data.

Some background: I use a lot of satellite imagery time series, that often comes with noise/alignment issues. The effect on uncertainty can be nicely estimated by spatial/temporal autocorrelation functions (I've been relying on scikit-gstat for variography).

I've worked a lot with xarray, but also rasterio/geopandas for raster/vector data. We've been trying to develop open-source efforts to simplify geospatial analysis: https://github.com/GlacioHack/geoutils and https://github.com/GlacioHack/xdem, still very much in development (we intend to shift towards xarray through rioxarray in the next version, as rioxarray wasn't stable yet when we started putting the package together).

In any case, thanks a lot for this nice effort! :slightly_smiling_face:

[pdevis]

Hi @rhugonnet, Thanks a lot for your message and sorry for the slow reply! Your suggestion is very interesting and I think definitely merits some further thought and discussion. Let's try to set up a meeting to discuss in more detail (I'll send you an email). Kind regards, Pieter