Enabling coastal analytics at planetary scale

Coastal science has entered a new era of data-driven research, facilitated by satellite data and cloud compute. Despite its potential, the coastal community has yet to fully capitalize on these advancements due to a lack of tailored data, tools, and models. This paper demonstrates how cloud technology can advance coastal analytics at scale. We introduce GCTS, a novel foundational dataset comprising over 11 million coastal transects at 100-meter resolution. Our experiments highlight the importance of cloud-optimized data formats, geospatial sorting, and metadata-driven data retrieval. By leveraging cloud technology, we achieve up to 700 times faster performance for tasks like coastal waterline mapping. A case study reveals that 33% of the world’s first kilometer of coast is below 5 meters, with the entire analysis completed in a few hours. Our findings make a compelling case for the coastal community to start producing data, tools, and models suitable for scalable coastal analytics. • Open, scalable workflows for efficient coastal analytics at planetary scale, that are up to 700 times faster than traditional download-and-analyze approaches. • Novel methods for coastal data management that enable coastal analytics at scale. • High-speed cloud-native coastal waterline mapping at approximately 50 kilometers per second. • Analysis using a novel 100-m Global Coastal Transect System reveals that 33% of the world’s first kilometer of coast lies below 5 meters. • PoC’s demonstrate how cloud technology can advance coastal science at scale.