SEAScope started as an internal project at OceanDataLab to work around some limitations of Syntool (an online visualisation tool), such as the need to reproject data or the difficulty to reconstruct geophysical values from the images produced for online visualisation.

The development of SEAScope would have been very difficult without the help of our sponsors:

In 2014 BPI France sponsored the development of a prototype for an application that would allow users to analyse and visualise Earth Observation data on a globe. Some of the technical components developed for the prototype have matured and are now at the core of SEAScope.

Later the same year, OceanDataLab took the lead for the development of the Ocean Virtual Laboratory (OVL), an activity supported by ESA SEOM to build a platform focussed on the exploitation of the synergy between Sentinel instruments and other mission Earth Observation datasets together with in-situ measurements.

Aside from offering an online data visualisation portal, the OVL also had to provide a framework to extract and analyse EO information, features that could not be implemented in the web version at the time being.

Although it was still in its early stages, SEAScope has been adopted as the "standalone" tool for the OVL and has evolved so that users can manipulate both data and rendering settings through Python plugins (or notebooks).