This short film promotes Geoscience Australia's online and publicly accessible hydrogen data products. The film steps through the functionality of GA's Australian Hydrogen Opportunities Tool (AusH2), and describes the upcoming Hydrogen Economic Fairways Tool which has been created through a collaborative effort with Monash University.

This report describes the results of an extended national field spectroscopy campaign designed to validate the Landsat 8 and Sentinel 2 Analysis Ready Data (ARD) surface reflectance (SR) products generated by Digital Earth Australia. Field spectral data from 55 overpass coincident field campaigns have been processed to match the ARD surface reflectances. The results suggest the Landsat 8 SR is validated to within 10%, the Sentinel 2A SR is validated to within 6.5% and Sentinel 2B is validated to within 6.8% . Overall combined Sentinel 2A and 2B are validated within 6.6% and the SR for all three ARD products are validated to within 7.7%.

Petascale archives of Earth observations from space (EOS) have the potential to characterise water resources at continental scales. For this data to be useful, it needs to be organised, converted from individual scenes as acquired by multiple sensors, converted into ‘analysis ready data’ and made available through high performance computing platforms. Moreover, converting this data into insights requires integration of non-EOS datasets that can provide biophysical and climatic context for EOS. Digital Earth Australia has demonstrated its ability to link EOS to rainfall and stream gauge data to provide insight into surface water dynamics during the hydrological extremes of flood and drought. This information is supporting the characterisation of groundwater resources across Australia’s north and could potentially be used to gain an understanding of the vulnerability of transport infrastructure to floods in remote, sparsely gauged regions of northern and central Australia.

The emerging global trend of satellite operators producing analysis ready data combined with open source tools for managing and exploiting this data are leading to more and more countries using Earth observation data to drive progress against key national and international development agendas. This paper provides examples from Australia, Mexico, Switzerland and Tanzania on how the Open Data Cube technology has been combined with analysis ready data to provide new insights and support better policy making across issues as diverse as water resource management through to urbanization and environmental-economic accounting.

The annual offshore petroleum exploration acreage release is part of the government’s strategy to promote offshore oil and gas exploration. Each year, the government invites companies to bid for the opportunity to invest in oil and gas exploration in Australian waters. The 21 areas shown have been nominated by petroleum industry stakeholders to be considered for the 2021 acreage release. Areas nominated for release will not receive endorsement from government until submissions resulting from a public consultation process can be considered. This publication does not indicate a commitment to a particular course of action.

The annual offshore petroleum exploration acreage release is part of the government’s strategy to promote offshore oil and gas exploration. Each year, the government invites companies to bid for the opportunity to invest in oil and gas exploration in Australian waters. The 21 areas shown have been nominated by petroleum industry stakeholders to be considered for the 2021 acreage release. Areas nominated for release will not receive endorsement from government until submissions resulting from a public consultation process can be considered. This publication does not indicate a commitment to a particular course of action.

Australia has been, and continues to be, a leader in isotope geochronology and geochemistry. While new isotopic data is being produced with ever increasing pace and diversity, there is also a rich legacy of existing high-quality age and isotopic data, most of which have been dispersed across a multitude of journal papers, reports and theses. Where compilations of isotopic data exist, they tend to have been undertaken at variable geographic scale, with variable purpose, format, styles, levels of detail and completeness. Consequently, it has been difficult to visualise or interrogate the collective value of age and isotopic data at continental-scale. Age and isotopic patterns at continental scale can provide intriguing insights into the temporal and chemical evolution of the continent (Fraser et al, 2020). As national custodian of geoscience data, Geoscience Australia has addressed this challenge by developing an Isotopic Atlas of Australia, which currently (as of November 2020) consists of national-scale coverages of four widely-used age and isotopic data-types: 4008 U-Pb mineral ages from magmatic, metamorphic and sedimentary rocks 2651 Sm-Nd whole-rock analyses, primarily of granites and felsic volcanics 5696 Lu-Hf (136 samples) and 553 O-isotope (24 samples) analyses of zircon 1522 Pb-Pb analyses of ores and ore-related minerals These isotopic coverages are now freely available as web-services for use and download from the GA Portal. While there is more legacy data to be added, and a never-ending stream of new data constantly emerging, the provision of these national coverages with consistent classification and attribution provides a range of benefits: vastly reduces duplication of effort in compiling bespoke datasets for specific regions or use-cases data density is sufficient to reveal meaningful temporal and spatial patterns a guide to the existence and source of data in areas of interest, and of major data gaps to be addressed in future work facilitates production of thematic maps from subsets of data. For example, a magmatic age map, or K-Ar mica cooling age map sample metadata such as lithology and stratigraphic unit is associated with each isotopic result, allowing for further filtering, subsetting and interpretation. The Isotopic Atlas of Australia will continue to develop via the addition of both new and legacy data to existing coverages, and by the addition of new data coverages from a wider range of isotopic systems and a wider range of geological sample media (e.g. soil, regolith and groundwater).

The Exploring for the Future program is an initiative by the Australian Government dedicated to boosting investment in resource exploration in Australia. The initial phase of this program led by Geoscience Australia focussed on northern Australia to gather new data and information about the potential mineral, energy and groundwater resources concealed beneath the surface. The northern Lawn Hill Platform is an intracratonic poly-phased history region of Paleoproterozoic to Mesoproterozic age consisting of mixed carbonates, siliciclastics and volcanics. It is considered a frontier basin with very little petroleum exploration to date, but with renewed interest in shale and tight gas, that may present new exploration opportunities. An understanding of the geochemistry of the sedimentary units, including the organic richness, hydrocarbon-generating potential and thermal maturity, is therefore an important characteristic needed to understand the resource potential of the region. As part of this program, Rock-Eval pyrolysis analyses were undertaken by Geoscience Australia on selected rock samples from 2 wells of the northern Lawn Hill Platform.

The petroleum systems summary report provides a compilation of the current understanding of petroleum systems for the McArthur Basin, including the prospective Beetaloo Sub-basin. The contents of this report are also available via the Geoscience Australia Portal at https://portal.ga.gov.au/, called The Petroleum Systems Summary Assessment Tool (Edwards et al., 2020). Three summaries have been developed as part of the Exploring for the Future (EFTF) program (Czarnota et al., 2020); the McArthur Basin, the Canning Basin, and a combined summary of the South Nicholson Basin and Isa Superbasin region. The petroleum systems summary reports aim to facilitate exploration by summarising key datasets related to conventional and unconventional hydrocarbon exploration, enabling a quick, high-level assessment the hydrocarbon prospectivity of the region.

This petroleum systems summary report provides a compilation of the current understanding of petroleum systems for the South Nicholson Basin and Isa Superbasin region. The contents of this report are also available via the Geoscience Australia Portal at https://portal.ga.gov.au/, called The Petroleum Systems Summary Assessment Tool (Edwards et al., 2020). Three summaries have been developed as part of the Exploring for the Future (EFTF) program (Czarnota et al., 2020); the McArthur Basin, the Canning Basin, and a combined summary of the South Nicholson Basin and Isa Superbasin region. The petroleum systems summary reports aim to facilitate exploration by summarizing key datasets related to conventional and unconventional hydrocarbon exploration, enabling a quick, high-level assessment the hydrocarbon prospectivity of the region.