Valladolid, Spain – 24th September, 2025 | GRASP Spain has partnered with SCAYLE, the Supercomputing Center located in the Iberian region of Castilla y León, to process key Copernicus products that support global atmospheric monitoring. Amongst these products, GRASP Spain is testing a pilot through the Sentinel-3 product generation with the GRASP inversion algorithm in order to deliver Level 2 atmospheric geophysical magnitudes of Sentinel-3’s OLCI sensor. “This demonstration using Sentinel-3 mission is an important milestone for GRASP Spain for demonstrating our technical and scientific capabilities,” said Dr. David Fuertes, CEO of GRASP. “The time and effort reduced for the processing value chain is a promising result for us —and the Earth Observation industry at large”.
The success of such demonstration lies on a hybrid processing strategy. To do so, the GRASP team repurposed existing aerosol and surface datasets from other missions, leveraging the flexibility from the GRASP algorithm retrieval framework. “This effort would not have been feasible without our optimized infrastructure and SCAYLE’s high-performance environment,” said Dr. Juan Carlos Antuña-Sánchez, CTO of IT Infrastructure at GRASP Spain. “The 2 km global processing for both OLCI-A and OLCI-B over two full years—initially projected to take six months—was completed in one.”
The director of SCAYLE, whose team provides operational support and on-site resources, notes the growing importance of supercomputing for large-scale environmental data applications. “We are proud to contribute to research that aligns with European environmental goals,” he stated. The collaboration demonstrates the strength of combining domain-specific expertise with large national infrastructure. With this milestone, GRASP Spain reaffirms its position at the forefront of world-class science-driven satellite data processing—paving the way for more responsive and reliable products to support atmospheric monitoring across Europe and beyond.
Looking ahead, GRASP Spain sees high-performance computing as a transformative enabler for the Earth observation sector. “Supercomputing is no longer optional for scalable satellite data processing—it’s fundamental,” emphasized Dr. Antuña-Sánchez. “We strongly encourage other organizations to explore these resources early, especially when dealing with global datasets and time-sensitive applications.” GRASP algorithms are already playing a key role in flagship European missions such as Sentinel-4, 3MI and CO2M. With the successful generation of atmosphere and surface products from this proof-of-concept, GRASP Spain is now preparing to expand its pipelines to support this new wave of missions, helping Europe strengthen its sovereignty and position in global environmental monitoring.
