Revision as of 14:11, 4 March 2021

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Goals

The GFMS is designed to achieve the following three major requirements, namely:

• to provide a continuous global, systematic monitoring of flood events,
• to significantly enhance the timeliness of flood maps for emergency response and
• to improve the effectiveness of Rapid Mapping activation requests through a better identification of the area of interest.

Additionally, the system is also designed to provide a long-term global flood monitoring archive. Making it ideal to provide essential information to plan for future events, such as flood protection measures or calibrate hydrological models. Finally, by combining data from the GFM service with other Copernicus Services, such as the Climate Service, the system will deliver useful information to address the challenges of climate change response management.

The aim of the proposed technical solution is the provisioning of an automated, global, satellite-based flood monitoring product enabling a continuous global, systematic monitoring of flood events complementing the existing CEMS components for flood early warning and on-demand mapping. The solution is based on all-weather, day-and-night SAR data provided by the Copernicus Sentinel-1 satellites. It will provide a continuous, NRT global monitoring of all major flood events by the systematic, automated delineation of flooded areas and waterbodies and will therefore

• enable a continuous global, systematic monitoring of flood events,
• enhance the timeliness of flood maps for emergency response due to its fully automated process, and
• improve the effectiveness of Rapid Mapping activation requests through a better identification of the area of interest.

The GFM service includes the establishment and operational implementation of all facilities and processes for:

1. Downloading worldwide Sentinel-1 Level 1 Ground Range Detected (GRD) imagery.
2. Pre-processing of the Sentinel-1 data and storing the resulting georeferenced image stacks.
3. Operational NRT application of high quality, fully automated flood mapping algorithms on a global scale.
4. Generation of the required global flood monitoring output layers including observed flood events, observed water extent, reference water mask, exclusion mask, and uncertainty values.
5. Data access and dissemination of the NRT flood monitoring product including an adequate user support.
6. Performing regular quality assurance including product timeliness and accuracy and service reliability and accessibility.
7. Building up a long-term archive for the analysis of past flood events

Partnership

GFMS is run by the GLOBAL FLOOD MONITORING ALLIANCE, consisting of

• 2 companies: the EODC (Earth Observation Data Centre - Group Leader) and GeoVille from Austria,
• 3 research institutions: the TU Wien (Austria), LIST (Luxembourg) and CIMA (Italy) and
• the German Aerospace Center (DLR, as sub-contractor to EODC)

comprises truly the most experienced group of leading experts in Europe for satellite based flood monitoring systems with a unique CLMS, CEMS and global flood mapping service heritage. From the early days of satellite based flood mapping and monitoring applications, the individual members of this group have built unprecedented, yet thematically complementary flood mapping, monitoring and related disaster risk service capacities as well as a accumulated a long track record of high-quality implementations and successful projects, related processing and data access systems with applications globally

EODC

EODC was the first operational BIG EO DATA processing center dedicated to the storage of global Sentinel-1 data as well as provision of fully automatic, continuous S-1 based processing services. In this regard, the company has a lead advance of some 5 years of hands-on operation experience as compared to any other Sentinel processing facilities or the Copernicus DIAS’s. Since 2018 EODC is a federation partner of the WEkEO Dias. Important for the GFM group leader, EODC has project implementation experience for both Copernicus Global Land Services and for operational JRC service projects (e.g. C-GLOPS1, C-GLOPS2).
Moreover, EODC currently leads the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) activity “Land hydrology and cryosphere” (C3S 312b Lot4), and the ESA Climate Change Initiative (CCI) “Soil Moisture” activity. The envisaged GFM processing and data access system will be set up based on lessons learned by EODC and GeoVille e.g. from CLMS Global Sentinel-1 Soil Moisture Service, the Sentinel2 Global Mosaic Service, the HRL Water&Wetness and the CLC+ DIAS-based processing setups (WEkEO, Mundi), and other cloud based applications (e.g. on AWS, EODC, CODE-DE, private clouds). Both partners have had the requirements for fast Sentinel-1 data access, implemented cutting-edge techniques (e.g. Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Deep Learning…) along with latest storage technologies within easily portable, scalable Sentinel based monitoring systems, providing blueprints for most efficient technology utilization for the GFM product.

GeoVille

GeoVille, based in Austria, is an internationally operating company, providing consultancy, services and products related to Earth Observation, Geo-information and Geographic Information Systems. We enable geographic accounting of human and natural dynamics through a satellite’s eye, adding the spatial dimension to information gathering, analysis and monitoring, for policy support and informed decision making. Our mission is to provide turnkey geospatial intelligence solutions enabling efficient data access, client operations and management. We aim at optimising the value of our spatial insights, thereby generating benefits and advances for our clients through reliable information. The company has a longstanding strong expertise and global experience in quality assessed information service provision in the field of flood monitoring services and related IT solutions, with an overall portfolio of more than 458 projects conducted in more than 137 countries.

LIST

The Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology (LIST) is a Research and Technology Organization (RTO) active in the fields of materials, environment and IT. It is under the trusteeship of the country’s Ministry of Higher Education and Research. Its mission is twofold: to contribute to Luxembourg’s reputation through a participation in several targeted research areas and to accelerate the country’s socio-economic development. LIST aligns its strategic priorities with the Luxembourg government's strategy of economic diversification by enhancing the country’s competitiveness and its position as a global hub for excellence in research and innovation. It works across the entire innovation chain: fundamental and applied research, incubation, transfer of technologies. By transforming scientific knowledge into technologies, smart data and tools, LIST empowers citizens in their choices, public authorities in their decisions and businesses in their strategies.

TU Wien

polytechnisches Institut“, making it the first University of Technology in today’s German speaking area. TU Wien’s microwave remote sensing (MRS) research group, which contributes to this consortium, is part of the Department for Geodesy and Geoinformation (GEO). The department conducts research and teaching in observing, modelling, and communicating geoscientific states and processes, and has a staff of about 100. The MRS group is led by Prof. Wolfgang Wagner, and focuses on the physical modelling of radar backscatter and the retrieval of soil moisture, water bodies, vegetation, and other geophysical variables from scatterometer and Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data. Their scientific work has paved the ground for several operational soil moisture data services for ASCAT and Sentinel-1 in cooperation with national (e.g. ZAMG, EODC) and international (e.g. EUMETSAT, ECMWF) partners. These data services have been developed and operated within the framework of EUMETSAT’s Satellite Application Facility in Support to Operational Hydrology and Water Management (H SAF), the Copernicus Global Land and Climate Change Services (CGLS and C3S), and the ESA Climate Change Initiative (CCI). An addition to the scientific output in numerous peer-reviewed research articles and conference contributions, most scientific algorithms and satellite data management software developed by the MRS team for scatterometer and SAR data analysis are implemented in various Python libraries, several of which are available as open source on https://github.com/TUW-GEO. The software libraries for ASCAT and Sentinel-1 are designed to allow global and operational processing, and have been deployed on desktop computers, operational systems, cloud platforms and high performance computing environments. The MRS group has led and participated in international research projects funded by ESA and the European Commission. Funding for national projects has been come e.g. from the Austrian Space Applications Programme, the Austrian Science Fund, and the Christian Doppler Laboratory. TU Wien has been one of the initiators and co-founders of the EODC Earth Observation Data Centre. In addition to being able to use EODC’s Petabyte-scale storage with its stored Sentinel EO data (Sentinel-1: Globally all available GRD data; Sentinel-2: Globally all available L1C data), its cloud platform, and TU Wien’s supercomputing facilities (Vienna Scientific Cluster), the TU Wien MRS group has powerful in-house processing capabilities: They operate an 800 TB Fileserver with a 1 PB robotic tape library, 12 top end working stations, several terminal servers, approximately 80 workstations and a back-up server. The internal network is based upon a Windows Active Directory Domain.

DLR

DLR represents the German Aerospace Research Center and the national Space Agency. It is organised as a chartered non-profit organisation and has approximately 9,100 employees at 27 locations in Germany. The work within this project will be conducted by the Georisks and Civil Security department of the German Remote Sensing Data Center (DFD). Its main focus is on supporting the entire disaster-management cycle with satellite-based geoinformation products in cases of environmental and natural threats, humanitarian crisis situations and civil security emergencies. The department has strong expertise and longstanding experience in satellite-based flood mapping and monitoring. Its scientific and technical work includes developing new analytical methodologies for working with remote sensing data, using and further developing geoinformation technologies, developing thematic remote sensing processors and monitoring systems, vulnerability and risk modelling, and designing and establishing crisis information and early warning systems. The department also operates the Center for Satellite Based Crisis Information (ZKI) (http://www.zki.dlr.de). Its function is the rapid acquisition, processing and analysis of satellite data and the provision of timely satellite-based information products for rapid decision support in case of disasters and humanitarian crisis and civil security emergencies.

CIMA Foundation

CIMA Research Foundation is a scientific organization under the Italian Legal Regulations governed by public law. CIMA is recognized as a center of excellence for civil protection by the national Italian regulation. The Foundation’s mission is to develop scientific and engineering technologies for application in environmental-related fields with focus on disaster risk reduction, civil protection and preservation of terrestrial and water-related ecosystems, always connecting research, operations, capacity development and assistance to the end users. The Foundation researchers have a long record in defining procedures and models to assess flood risk. This expertise grew taking advantage of the direct contact with institutions operating on the topic and has been always characterized by the use of the state-of-the-art technologies in order to improve the detail of flood hazard mapping as well as of flood vulnerability assessment. Specific GIS and WEB-GIS tools developed by CIMA represent the best of the available information on the territory and provide an added value in all the projects developed in this research area and are taken as current global reference for flood monitoring by international bodies such as WMO.

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