Skip to content

AZO is currently looking for experts to become mentors of the Copernicus Accelerator programme, funded by the European Commission. The initiative aims to provide a tailored business coaching service to foster the development of commercial Earth observation applications and products.

Mentors for Copernicus Accelerator

The Copernicus Accelerator has been initiated by the European Commission in the framework of the Copernicus Masters in 2016. Thanks to this, the top 50 ideas will get customised business coaching. Therefore, the accelerator is now looking for mentors to provide e.g. business support, integration into an incubator, win over a first client, raising funding, etc. Mentors can provide services for up to 2 teams / entrepreneurs of the 50 best ranked Copernicus Masters participants. The chosen mentors will be remunerated 5.000 € at the end of the coaching experience, that will last approximately up to 1 year. In addition travel costs and accommodation to Tallinn are covered to participate in the accelerator boot-camp (6-7 Nov 2017) that will take place in line with the Award Ceremony.

The eligibility criteria to become a mentor are the following:

  • Employed with a legal identity registered in the territory of one of the Copernicus Participating Countries, whose business purpose is focused on business consulting, e.g. business incubation centres, consulting companies, business intermediaries, university-based startup centres, innovation agencies etc.
  • Individual mentors that reside in the territory of one of the Copernicus Participating Countries, with a proven track record of customer references (preferably startups) that they have mentored in the chosen field of expertise

Register as a mentor until July 28
More information on Copernicus Accelerator

Spend the summer playing and learning how you can make even better use of Earth observations. Together with leading experts in Europe, NextGEOSS offers multiple ways of having fun no matter what the weather will be like this summer.

First version of the NextGEOSS data hub

At the 1st NextGEOSS Summit and the European GEO Workshop 19-22 June 2017, the first version of the NextGEOSS data hub was shown and demonstrated. The data hub, a so-called internal alpha release at this stage, was the first of a series of releases. The first public version is scheduled towards the end of 2017. For those who would like to familiarize themselves and play with the NextGEOSS data hub, it is possible to do so through the email nextgeoss@deimos.com.pt

First NextGEOSS Training – The User Feedback Week 11-15 September

The NextGEOSS User Feedback Week will contain a series of online workshops addressing how we can optimize user feedback mechanisms in the Next Generation Earth Observations Data Hub. As part of the User Feedback Week there will be an unique opportunity to get Earth observation training by professionals. The focus of the training will be on applying and making use of a user feedback system for Earth observations. The case of Disaster Risk Reduction with scenarios defined by experts in the field, will animate the face-to-face training that will take place in Reading, UK on 13th September. The training is tailored for users with some experience and knowledge about applying Earth observations. There will also be webinars, interviews with experts such as professor Stefano Salvi from the Geohazards Supersites and Natural Laboratories (GSNL), Sveinung Løkken from ESAs Thematic Exploitation Platform (TEP) and more. Sign up for updates at : http://nextgeoss.eu/first-nextgeoss-training/

The INSPIRE Hackathon – Open Data, Volunteered Geographical Information, Citizens Observatories

The INSPIRE Hack focuses on methods where citizens are able to contribute to different environmental and societal issues through smart phones and other sensors.
More engagement opportunities are offered this summer, leading up to a grand finale at the annual INSPIRE Conference 4. – 9. September 2017. NextGEOSS has teamed up with seasoned hackathon organizers from Plan4ALL, The H2020 projects DataBio, and SKIN who invites you to participate in the 2nd INSPIRE Hackathon.

For more information about NextGEOSS, check out the brochure and website. Or follow NextGEOSS on Twitter (@NextGEOSS) or Facebook (NextGEOSS).

The population increase confronts our societies with major and complex challenges regarding the production of raw materials, recycling, and the management of waste material.

Thanks to the geospatial data it collects and provides free of charge to users, Copernicus has a strong potential for contributing to meet these challenges, either by improving existing applications or by enabling new applications to emerge.

In this context, three post-doctoral research scholarship projects co-funded by the European Commission and the EIT RawMaterials under the RawMATCop project are going to develop skills and expertise, as well as demonstrations and new applications at the intersection between Earth observation data and the raw materials sector.

The outcomes of these 12-month projects will serve as a basis for the elaboration of a lifelong learning course to be executed in the second quarter of 2018. The course will aim at training raw materials practitioners, professionals and researchers in how to use Copernicus data in their daily work. It will be open to participants from both inside and outside the EIT RawMaterials community.

The three awarded projects are:

  • “Integration of Copernicus data in a multi-scale and multi-source exploration scheme”. Raw materials security in the EU requires exploration discoveries that increase reserves of strategically-important raw materials. The project intends to demonstrate that Copernicus can provide the backbone to boost the performance of traditional exploration techniques while making them more acceptable.
  • “Spatiotemporal mapping of dust dispersion around mining sites using remote sensing”. Sentinel 2 has a proven potential for mapping iron oxides and offers a high revisiting time. The project aims at exploring the potential of Copernicus data in mine site monitoring and especially in mapping dust dispersion patterns around active sites.
  • “Earth’s Critical Zone Early Warning System (CZ-EWS) by integrating SAR and seismic data in a mining context”. The public perception of mining industry is usually negative due to the impact that mining activities have on the near surface environment where Earth, water and life interact (known as the “Earth’s Critical Zone” – CZ). The project aims at improving mining viability by developing a CZ Early Warning System and guaranteeing ground/underground CZ integrity

Source

Gilching, 26 June 2017. Copernicus App Lab’s data access platform merges the scientific Earth observation (EO) community and mobile developers for a safer, healthier and economical stronger world. Registration are welcome now – all entries are automatically part of an exclusive beta-community.

The Copernicus App Lab provides an easy data access platform that brings together the scientific Earth observation (EO) community and mobile developers. A proof-of-concept provides data from the Copernicus Land, Marine Environment, and Atmosphere Monitoring Services as linked open data to promote the inclusion of EO data in mobile applications. Hereby, app developers bridge the digital divide between the established, science-driven EO community and the innovative, entrepreneurial world.

In order to participate in this collective endeavor making the world a safer and economically stronger place, app developers are now called to register until 24 July 2017 at www.app-lab.eu/

Registrations are automatically part of an exclusive beta-community with a free travel to the European Space Agency (ESA) App Camp to Frascati, Italy.

“Copernicus will deliver an unprecedented volume of available data, provide new operational services, and foster new business opportunities and job creation.” explains Elzbieta Bienkowska, European Commissioner for Internal Market, Industry, Entrepreneurship and SMEs.

The overall objective of the Copernicus App Lab is to demonstrate a user-driven evolution in services that can be integrated seamlessly into the existing service architecture. This means, that Copernicus contributes to the development of innovative applications and services, by making the vast majority of its data, analyses, forecasts, and maps freely available and accessible, in order to make our world safer, healthier, and economically stronger. Thus, the simple data access every downstream service developer requires, must be combined with in-depth knowledge of EO data processing.

Download the Press Release

15 June 2017 – by Benedict O’Donnell
World-leading research institutes have agreed to join forces with funding agencies and policymakers to create the European Open Science Cloud, the largest shared data repository in history.

The idea is to give every scientific user access to the data resulting from research carried out with public funding, using a single login.

According to Professor Iain Mattaj, head of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany, the cloud-based service could facilitate the sort of interdisciplinary collaboration that has transformed our present understanding of the earth’s climate and the human genome.

By 2020, it could grant the science community direct and easy access to scientific data generated by publicly funded research, and used for scientific publication.

Broad agreement on the go-ahead came during the European Open Science Cloud Summit in Brussels, Belgium, on 12 June. Carlos Moedas, the European Commissioner for Research, Science and Innovation, described the European Open Science Cloud as a one-stop shop for scientists to pool their observations, and as a commons for European science. ‘I see it as a new Republic of Letters,’ he said, referring to the correspondence between intellectuals during the Age of Enlightenment.

The platform could save time on unnecessary duplication of experiments and grant even small research groups access to vast data samples.

This unprecedented pooling of research data from across scientific disciplines and national borders takes to a new level the open research data repositories that have supported scientific collaboration since the early days of the internet.

No one is underestimating the scale of the challenges to be faced in making the European Open Science Cloud work.

‘We are talking about a staggering amount of data,’ said Dr Harald Reichert from the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, France. His institute alone records petabytes (millions of gigabytes) of measurements each month – enough to drown even Facebook’s servers over just a couple of years. Making this volume of research data accessible to 1.7 million researchers across Europe requires vast amounts of bandwidth, funding and work, he said.

Professor John Womersley from the European Spallation Source super microscope in Lund, Sweden, insisted that storing data is not enough. The success of the European Open Science Cloud will hinge on how easy it is to access and use.

‘The internet would be useless if it was just data,’ said Prof. Womersley. ‘Researchers also need tools like browsers, search engines and apps that find the data that they are looking for and turn it into something that they can use.’

Decades

This raises unprecedented data management questions, said Professor Eckhard Elsen from the CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) particle accelerator in Geneva, Switzerland. ‘In research fields like climatology, data need to be averaged over decades before they can be used,’ he said. ‘A private company can go bankrupt over those periods.’

To avert the risk of the science cloud becoming a research data graveyard, these tools have to meet the needs of research communities across different sciences, with each dataset annotated and formatted in a way that one single system can make sense of.

According to Dr Reichert, annotating the details of each dataset would be too time-consuming for scientists to do themselves – all the more so in cross-disciplinary research, where the requirements of peers are not necessarily known.

Research data ‘stewards’ would be needed, in addition to strong incentives and skills for all scientists to be able to share research data, in order to ensure the quality of the data.

Volunteers are now formalising their commitments in a joint declaration, and aim to share tasks in a structured, open strategy, with the agreement of EU Member States.

The national science funds of the Netherlands and Switzerland have agreed to provide advice on making the data released by new research projects internationally accessible, and other participants have offered their experience in data exchange platforms spanning borders and specialisations.

Commissioner Moedas announced that the EU itself would invest over EUR 200 million over the next two years into coordinating on-going efforts.

‘We want to put our money where our mouth is and get the European Open Science Cloud running by 2020,’ said Commissioner Moedas. ‘Science has outgrown the constraints of technology once again. It needs this internet of research data to continue.’

Next steps

The idea is for the open science cloud summit to result in a formal declaration, which will be agreed upon by all stakeholders. There will be a plan on how to achieve the European Open Science Cloud by the end of this year, according to the European Commission. This will include a strategy for governance and funding.
A dedicated governance board will also handle the implementation of the open science cloud by 2020.

Source

22 June 2017. ECMWF Member States, gathered in Reading for the 90th session of the Centre’s Council, have approved the proposal by the Italian Government and the Emilia Romagna Region to host ECMWF’s new data centre in Bologna.

The decision was taken on 22 June at the end of a two-day session of Council, the Centre’s governing body, which includes representatives of all its Member States. The Italian proposal to host the Centre’s data centre had been evaluated as part of an international competition and was judged at the beginning of the year to best meet ECMWF’s requirements. Member States then tasked Director-General Florence Rabier with entering into discussions with the Italian Government with a view to having a high-level agreement ready for this session of Council.

After discussions and votes, representatives of ECMWF’s Member States were satisfied with the high-level agreement proposed by Italy and approved Bologna as the host city for ECMWF’s new data centre. The building is to be delivered to ECMWF by 2019 and will host the Centre’s new supercomputers, whilst the Centre’s headquarters are to remain in the UK.


The Head of the Italian National Meteorological Service, Col. Silvio Cau, and ECMWF Director-General Florence Rabier (seated) signed the high-level agreement on the data centre in the presence of representatives from all 22 ECMWF Member States.

Dr Rabier commented: “I am delighted that our Council has decided to support the proposal by Italy to host ECMWF’s new data centre. This new facility will allow us to upgrade our high-performance computing capability to the levels required to continue to advance weather science. The decision-making process has been long, thorough and at times difficult, and we have already incurred some delays which could have an impact on our computing capability within the next couple of years. We are extremely grateful to all our Member States, who have taken great care to ensure that ECMWF’s best interests would prevail. Of course I want to especially thank the Italian authorities, who have worked tirelessly to ensure that their proposal meets all the required criteria. Having our headquarters in the UK and our data centre in Italy will be a new experience which will illustrate perfectly well the truly intergovernmental nature of ECMWF.”

The President of Council, Professor Miguel Miranda, added: “Weather forecasts in each of the Member States, and indeed far beyond, rely on ECMWF continuing to produce and deliver the best numerical prediction in the world. Today’s decision will enable the Centre to start planning in earnest for the procurement of its next supercomputing system. On behalf of our Council of Member States, I want to join the Director-General in expressing our gratitude to all Member States, who have participated actively in this process. The new Data Centre will be located in Italy, with significant support from the government and the Emilia Romagna region. There is still a lot to do to ensure that the premises will be fit for purpose in two years’ time, and we cannot but be impressed by the enthusiasm and the ardour the Italian team has put into this project so far. ECMWF is an example of European nations pooling their resources to achieve the best possible outcome. ECMWF was created 40 years ago and there are major challenges ahead in today’s world marked by a changing climate.”

“This result – said the Italian Minister of Environment Gian Luca Galletti – is a great success for Italy. The new data centre in Bologna will allow ECMWF to continue its important work in studying weather phenomena as a strategic element for sustainable economic progress and citizen security. Now Bologna is at the centre of the global environmental challenges. This will further enhance the skills, the ability to innovate, the attractive pole of environmental data which are the heritage of the city. This is the result – said Galletti – of impressive teamwork of many Italian institutions, such as the Ministries of Environment, Education, Defence, Foreign Affairs, Economy and Finance, the Emilia Romagna Region with President Stefano Bonaccini, the municipality of Bologna with Major Virginio Merola, and the Alma Mater University with rector Francesco Ubertini. I want to thank Director-General Rabier and President Miranda of ECMWF, together with all Member States: this is a responsibility that Bologna will surely honour.”

ECMWF’s ten-year Strategy adopted in 2016 sets ambitious goals for Earth system modelling at high resolution. It specifies a target of a 5 km grid spacing for ensemble forecasts by 2025, down from 18 km today. An intermediate step will be the implementation of a 9 km ensemble in 2020–2021. These resolution upgrades will require a new high-performance computing facility with approximately ten times as much computational capacity as is currently available to ECMWF, some of which will come from more processors. The new facility in Bologna will give us the flexibility to accommodate the latest technologies in supercomputing.

Further information
The Council Resolution on the location of the new ECMWF data centre

14 June 2017, Rome – Scientists from the European Space Agency collaborate with FAO to control Desert Locusts

Information from satellites is being used in a new way to predict favourable conditions for Desert Locust swarms, as part of an early warning collaboration by scientists from the European Space Agency (ESA) and Desert Locust experts at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). The new technology will help to increase the warning time for locust outbreaks by up to two months.

Using data from satellites such as ESA’s Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity mission (SMOS), a new tool has been developed to monitor the conditions that can lead to swarming locusts, such as soil moisture and green vegetation. Swarming occurs when a period of drought is followed by good rains and rapid vegetation growth.

“At FAO, we have a decades-long track record of forecasting plagues and working closely with countries at greatest risk to implement control measures. By bringing our expertise together with ESA’s satellite capabilities we can significantly improve timely and accurate forecasting. Longer warning periods give countries more time to act swiftly to control a potential outbreak and prevent massive food losses,” said Keith Cressman, FAO’s Senior Locust Forecasting Officer.

“Routine global observations by the Copernicus Sentinel satellites coupled with the free and open data policy are excellent prerequisites for a closer cooperation with international partners like FAO and other UN organizations,” said Josef Aschbacher, ESA’s Director of Earth Observation Programmes which is based in Italy. “We strongly support these organizations’ Research & Development activities, which helps to continuously innovate the use of the satellite observations.”

How it works

Soil moisture indicates how much water is available for vegetation growth and favourable locust breeding conditions, and can therefore predict the presence of locusts 2-3 months in advance. In the past, satellite-based locust forecasts were derived from information on green vegetation, meaning the favourable conditions for locust swarms were already present and only allowed for a warning period of one month.

The new tool was validated in Algeria, Mali, Mauritania and Morocco. Using the example of Mauritania’s last outbreak in 2016, the team was able to identify a time lag of about 70 days from the initial signs of soil moisture to when the outbreak eventually occurred. The additional early warning will allow more time for national authorities to prepare for control measures when facing future outbreaks.

“We now have the possibility to see the risk of a locust outbreak one to two months in advance, which helps us to better establish preventive control,” said Ahmed Salem Benahi, Chief Information Officer for Mauritania’s National Centre for Locust Control.

Desert Locust swarms can destroy crops and affect food security and livelihoods.

Major threat to food security

Desert Locusts are grasshoppers that can form large swarms and pose a major threat to agricultural production, livelihoods and food security. They are found primarily in the Sahara, across the Arabian Peninsula and into India. The insect is usually harmless, but swarms can migrate across long distances and cause widespread crop damage. A one square kilometre-sized swarm contains about 40 million locusts, which eat the same amount of food in one day as about 35,000 people.

More than 8 million people were affected in West Africa during the 2003-2005 plague in which cereal crops were wiped out and up to 90 percent of legumes and pasture were destroyed. It took nearly $600 million and 13 million litres of pesticide to bring it under control.

Source

A new global data community aimed at expanding the climate risk adaption strategies for the insurance and investment markets is to protect against economic losses incurred through damages to infrastructure during natural disasters.

The Oasis HUB has been supported by funds totalling €11m from the EU’s Horizon 2020 platform and the public-private innovation partnership Climate-KIC. The hub will act as a data platform to open-up the risk modelling market, enabling insurers, financiers, academics, businesses and policy makers to respond to natural hazards and protect finances tied into infrastructure assets.

Oasis HUB’s chairman Dickie Whitaker said: “Traditionally, the wealth of data models produced within academia and the modelling community have not been made widely available to the organisations needing them most. Also, prohibitively high costs have prevented ‘black box’ data from the catastrophe modelling market incumbents from being employed on a wide scale.

“Now, with Oasis Hub as a gateway, scientific theory and data can be made focused and actionable, to meet the huge market demand for climate risk adaption strategies.”

Total economic losses associated with property and infrastructure damages derived from natural disasters have cost, on average, €160bn annually over the last decade, 70% of which are uninsured.

The hub aims to provide the insurance industry with a clearer understanding of these risks to mobilise capital through the rapid integration of transparent and affordable data.

Commenting on the launch, the European Commission’s head of unit – climate action, Andrea Tilche, said: “The Oasis project is a good example of how knowledge and information on climate change may be translated into innovative services, providing effective means to make societies more resilient to climate-related risks.

“The project also promises to show how an approach based on open science and innovation can deliver results that would be hardly achievable without the free sharing of knowledge among different communities.”

Source

Brussels, 9 June 2017. The ‘Copernicus Goes Local – Implementing the Space Strategy for Europe’ event gathered more than 300 Earth Observation actors and industry representatives from across Europe at the European Parliament in Brussels. EARSC Secretariat and several members attended this launch ceremony.

First row from left to the right: Emanuele Barreca, EC officer; Gedas Vaitukus, Lithuanian Copernicus Relays representative; Josef Aschbacher, Director of Earth Observation Programmes at the European Space Agency; Philippe Brunet, Director of EC’s Directorate for Space Policy, Copernicus and Defence; Constanze Krehl, MEP; Elżbieta Bieńkowska, Commissioner for Internal Market, Industry, Entrepreneurship and SMEs; Monika Hohlmeier, MEP and Chair of the Sky and Space Intergroup; Markku Markkula, President of the Committee of the Regions; Peter Zeil, Copernicus Academy representative; Julien Turpin, EC officer and Stefano La Terra Bella, EC officer. (© European Commission)

“Copernicus is a user-driven programme and we need the Copernicus Relays and Copernicus Academy to help us reach its full potential! […] We [EU] also want to go a step further by creating the conditions for a new downstream ecosystem to develop. The Copernicus Relays and the Copernicus Academy will be the backbone of our strategy”.

This is how Elżbieta Bieńkowska, Commissioner for the Internal Market, Industry, Entrepreneurship and SMEs welcomed to the new members of the “Copernicus family” at the official launch ceremony of the Copernicus Relays and Copernicus Academy, that took place on Tuesday 6 June.

The European Parliament (EP) in Brussels, the chamber at which all the EU citizens are represented and which houses the more than 750 offices of elected members, was the venue hosting the first milestone for the European Space Strategy and the latest for the Copernicus Programme. The Copernicus Relays and Academy networks, created by the European Commission at the beginning of the year, are a ground-breaking tool for the strong uptake of the Copernicus Programme across Europe, and have aroused vast interest from entities in all participating countries – and beyond. The importance of involving industry and notably SMEs was stressed by several speakers.

The Copernicus Relays are the regional voices of Copernicus in the individual Member States, thus creating a bridge between the EC and the end-users of Copernicus. The Academy aims to educate and release an increasing amount of Copernicus-savvy people into the workforce bringing together the educational and research sectors across the EU.

Read more about the event

The Copernicus Sentinel-1 satellites are being used to detect and better evaluate management practices of grasslands in Estonia.

Grasslands are those areas on Earth where vegetation is dominated by grasses, which can vary in height from very short to quite tall.

Grasslands play an important role in agriculture and the economy. They cover some 37% of Earth’s land surface when calculated with shrub-lands and savannas. In Western Europe, grasslands comprise 40% of agricultural land.

Earth observation satellites are playing an increasingly relevant role in monitoring and assessing the health of grasslands, and in evaluating management practices.

Since 2015, the Tartu Observatory, its spin-off KappaZeta Ltd and software integrator CGI have actively pursued the goal of creating a system capable of detecting grassland management practices based on Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 data.

Grass mowing detection

The application can have a great potential in the context of the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy (EU CAP), where one of the requirements for subsidy payments is regular mowing of the grasslands. So far, checks have mainly relied on inspectors, but field visits are expensive, time-consuming and can never cover the entire country. Applying satellite remote sensing for inspections is a logical technological step forward. This would also help to reduce manual labour while giving a more objective picture of the condition of agricultural grasslands throughout the EU.

As a collaborative project between the Tartu Observatory and CGI, an automatic satellite-based grasslands mowing detection system has been in development in Estonia since 2016. This year, it is being validated countrywide and in 2018 the system will become operational.

An ESA-funded mowing detection user trial project has also just been launched in Denmark and Sweden. The project, run by KappaZeta, aims to enable automatic mowing detection work in other EU countries, taking into account the varying climatic, ecological and agricultural conditions.

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data, provided by the Copernicus Sentinel-1A and -1B constellation, gives unprecedented time series of acquisitions suitable for interferometric SAR (InSAR) analysis. With a repeat cycle of six days, it is possible to evaluate changes in different land cover classes via interferometric coherence that measure temporal decorrelation. In general, forests and vegetation have low coherence values, while open and unvegetated areas can maintain high coherence over time.

SAR acquisitions are not impeded by lack of sunlight or cloudy conditions, thus allowing constant monitoring. Sentinel-1 satellites mostly operate over land in the Interferometric Wide Swath mode (IW) providing dual-polarisation data (VV + VH), with a swath of 250 km.

A study was carried-out in the Rannu parish of Central Estonia, a relatively flat area predominantly used for agriculture, to describe the relationship between the C-band SAR interferometric coherence and the mowing of grasslands.

The main focus was on the impact that temporal separation between mowing and interferometric acquisitions had on coherence values.

From May to September 2015, six grassland areas were monitored on a weekly basis, providing information about the vegetation height, wet and dry above-ground biomass, and soil moisture.

Coherence values for each of the six measurement areas where vegetation parameters were recorded throughout the summer were given for VH and VV polarisations, respectively. The time series illustrate the complexity of the relationship between mowing events and coherence.

Mowing was rarely characterised by the complete removal of vegetation, with grass of 0.1 to 0.2 m high left on the field. Very high coherence caused by coherent scattering from soil was rarely observed. Even when bare soil was present, coherence values fluctuated. A clear and statistically significant correlation between the mowing event and the increase of coherence in the Sentinel-1 time series was still observed.

Kaupo Voormansik, SAR expert at KappaZeta Ltd., says, “Sentinel-1 six and twelve day coherence has a strong potential for land applications, but is still very rarely used. For numerous applications coherence is a much more useful and reliable parameter than backscatter. Grasslands mowing detection is just the beginning.”

The Copernicus Land Monitoring Service (CLMS), which has been operational since 2012, supports applications in a variety of domains such as spatial planning, forest management, water management, and agriculture and food security. It consists of three main components (a global component; a Pan-European component; and a local component), where the Pan-European one, coordinated by the European Environment Agency, produces High-Resolution Layers describing the main land cover types: artificial surfaces (e.g. roads and paved areas), forest areas, agricultural areas (permanent grasslands), wetness and small water bodies.

Additionally, the Sentinel-2 data allows the CLMS to develop a phenology service product, which exploits the high acquisition frequency and spectral richness of Sentinel-2. This high resolution phenological information will contribute to the improvement of the quality of existing HRL Copernicus products relating to grasslands.

Whereas Sentinel-2 is the key Sentinel mission to support the generation of such data sets, the Sentinel-1 radar mission, with its advantage of systematically producing imagery regardless of clouds, potentially offers very good complementarity to optical missions. Sentinel-1 is being used for the global component of the Copernicus Land Monitoring Service, for the operational retrieval of Surface Soil Moisture (SSM) information data.

About the Sentinels

The Sentinels are a fleet of dedicated EU-owned satellites, designed to deliver the wealth of data and imagery that are central to Europe’s Copernicus environmental programme.

In partnership with EU Member States, the European Commission leads and coordinates this programme, to improve the management of the environment, safeguarding lives every day. ESA is in charge of the space component, responsible for developing the family of Copernicus Sentinel satellites and ensuring the flow of data for the Copernicus services, while the operations of the Sentinels have been entrusted to ESA and EUMETSAT.

Source