Worldview & Onearth: NSW Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water (DCCEEW)

Purpose:

The NSW Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water (DCCEEW) wanted to provide air-quality forecasting layers for the monitoring, analysis and assessment of air-quality and extreme events in NSW. The tool was designed to assist forecasters’ decision making, as well as inform third parties such as NSW Health, the Rural FireServicesand the public. Intersect was tasked to provide a customized solution to fit Worldview & Onearth for its own requirements.

Key Insights:

The NSW DCCEEW’s Worldview & Onearth application provides the capability to interactively browse a set of forecast layers, fused with satellite imagery layers and allow downloading of the underlying data. New layers are added on a daily basis. 

The application supports time-critical application areas under two categories such as Forecast Meteorology & Forecast Pollutants. It is used for daily air-quality forecasting and alerting of extreme events such as poor air-quality during planned burns, wood heaters and elevated levels of surface ozone. For example, layers being provisioned include

Forecast Meteorology

  • Temperature (K) – Surface
  • Windspeed at 10m – Surface
  • Wind Direction at 10m – Surface
  • Rainfall (mm) – Surface
  • Mixing Height (m) – Surface

Forecast Pollutants

  • Carbon Monoxide – Surface
  • Nitric Oxide – Surface
  • Nitrogen Dioxide – Surface
  • Ozone – Surface
  • Particulate Matter 2.5um – Surface
  • Sulphur Dioxide – Surface

Our Solution:

The solution is based on Worldview & Onearth which provides an interactive interface for browsing full-resolution, global satellite imagery. Intersect’s Engineering team provided a customised,  production-ready Worldview & Onearth application on the AWS cloud platform for use on NSW DCCEEW’s Science, Data and Compute platform (SDC). The Intersect’s Engineering team provided the following services to customise the existing NSW DCCEEW Worldview & Onearth application:

  1. Deployment of the application to AWS Cloud environment using EKS, Lambda, Cloudfront, CDK and other AWS services
  2. Automated the deployment of regular update of the data for NSW domain
  3. Branded the application to NSW DCCEEW styling 
  4. Upgraded application versions

At Intersect, we work across a range of AWS cloud technologies to build, deploy, and optimize scalable cloud-native solutions. Key contributions included:

  1. Infrastructure as Code with AWS CDK
    Developed and maintained robust infrastructure using AWS CDK (Cloud Development Kit), enabling repeatable, version-controlled deployments across environments. This included automating network configurations, storage provisioning, and compute orchestration.
  1. Kubernetes Orchestration on AWS EKS
    Designed and deployed Kubernetes templates for containerized microservices powering Onearth’s core offerings—Tiles, Time, and Capabilities services. Deployed these workloads on AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), ensuring high availability, auto-scaling, and seamless CI/CD integration.
  1. Data Transfer Automation from S3 to EFS using Lambda
    Engineered an event-driven data pipeline using AWS Lambda to automatically move and synchronize geospatial data from S3 buckets to EFS (Elastic File System) mounts. This streamlined access for compute-heavy workloads needing persistent storage.
  1. Content Delivery with Amazon CloudFront
    Configured CloudFront distributions to enable secure and efficient public access to geospatial assets. Leveraged caching, edge locations, and signed URLs to enhance performance and scalability for global users.

NSW DCCEWW’s data flow diagram:

Summary:

Intersect’s Engineering team built a tailored version of Worldview and Onearth applications for the NSW Government’s Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water (DCCEEW). This solution was set up on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to help manage and share environmental data effectively.

Intersect…

  • moved the application to the cloud: Set up the Worldview and Onearth tools on AWS using technologies like Kubernetes (EKS), Lambda, and CloudFront to make the system reliable and scalable.
  • automated data updates: Created a system to regularly update environmental data for New South Wales without manual effort.
  • customized the look: The application was redesigned to match NSW DCCEEW’s branding.
  • updated the software: Upgraded the application to the latest version for better performance.

Image: NSW DCCEEW Worldview

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