• Question: how much data do you get in a day

    Asked by anon-223184 to Adam, Anastasia, Kate, Sam, Sreejita, Valerio on 11 Nov 2019.
    • Photo: Kate Winfield

      Kate Winfield answered on 11 Nov 2019:

      This all depends on the day, but typically we could have 50TB (Terabyte) arrive in a single day. So 1TB is equivalent to 1000GB. A mobile phone could have 32GB of storage. If we imagine 1GB of data is the equivalent of 1 gram in weight, the data that comes in everyday is equal to the weight of 10 cats!

      Of this 50TB approximately, 10TB equal to the weight of 2 cats is full of satellite images from the Sentinel satellites (More info on Sentinel https://sentinel.esa.int/web/sentinel/home).

      But everyday is different!

    • Photo: Anastasia Aliferi

      Anastasia Aliferi answered on 11 Nov 2019:

      Depends on the day! When I’m working with my own data I get information for 20-30 people at a time which is around 1-2GB – that is the same as watching 70-140 YouTube videos on your phone. But when I’m analyzing data from big studies that involve thousands of people, I’m working with 10-50 times that! I had to upgrade to a better computer recently because my old one was taking half an hour to even open one of these files.

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