Contemporary Computing Technologies for Processing Big Spatiotemporal Data - Space-Time Integration in Geography and GIScience - page 321

Chapter 18
Contemporary Computing Technologies
for Processing Big Spatiotemporal Data

Chaowei Yang, Min Sun, Kai Liu, Qunying Huang, Zhenlong Li,
Zhipeng Gui, Yunfeng Jiang, Jizhe Xia, Manzhu Yu, Chen Xu,
Peter Lostritto, and Nanying Zhou

18.1 Introduction

To better understand physical and social phenomena and the impact of human
activities on them, scientists have collected data about the Earth's surface for
hundreds of years (Jacobson et al. 2000 ). For example, the Earth's surface tempera-
ture (Kusuda and Achenbach 1965 ), volcanic eruptions (Robock 2000 ), hurricanes
(Goldenberg et al. 2001 ), and other parameters of geographic phenomena have been
recorded. In the past century, the invention of computers for information processing,
launching of satellites and the evolution of remote sensing technologies have greatly
improved our capabilities to observe and record various physical parameters of the
Earth's surface (Christian 2005 ). This is reflected in at least five aspects.
First, our ability to record physical phenomenon is growing from one dimension,
to two, three, four and even higher dimensions (Akyildiz et al. 2002 ). In the past,
we were only able to quantify the physical phenomena like temperature or snowfall
for a specific representative point. For example, Washington D.C. had a historical
snowfall of over 2 ft in February 2010. Recent developments have allowed us to use
satellite technology to observe the Earth and capture 2D/3D values for a continuous
surface on the planet, such as elevation data (Rodríguez et al. 2006 ).