Copernicus Sentinel missions for Water Resources

The European Union (EU) have promoted since 1998 (Baveno Manifesto) the GMES Programme (Global Monitoring for Environment and Security), that nowadays turned to Copernicus (www.copernicus.eu). The European Space Agency (ESA) has been the main technical player in this context, launching the Sentinel satellites. The adoption of Copernicus Sentinel missions and services, in the water quality domain, improved the study of chlorophyll-a (Chl-a) concentrations, phycocyanin (PC), total suspended matter (TSM), colored dissolved organic matter (CDOM) and water surface temperature, focusing on the Cost/Benefit analysis (environmental and economic). The fundamentals of Earth Observation (EO), Geographic Information (GI) and Geomatics techniques, are crucial for the development of innovative strategies for professional skills adequacy and capacity building [1], supporting Copernicus user uptake. One of the main task is to support gaps bridging between supply and demand in terms of both education and training for the geospatial sector with the aim of reinforcing the present academic proposal, fostering the uptake and the integration of Copernicus data and services within the end-user applications (www.eo4geo.eu). Referring to the water resources domain the main considered topics are: atmospheric correction, water optical properties, algorithms for retrieving water quality information. The outcomes of several concluded or ongoing international projects (H2020 EOMORES, Earth Observation based services for Monitoring and Reporting of Ecological Status, and ESA - SEOM SEN2CORAL) should be also taken into account, being aimed at developing commercial services for monitoring the quality of inland and coastal water bodies and to improve processing algorithms. Such activities are supported by innovative and strategical novelties like the complete free access to the imagery archives of the Copernicus Sentinel missions and the availability of the dedicated data processing software SNAP (Sentinel Application Platform). Additionally, cloud-based solution embedding global archive catalogues (e.g. Google Earth Engine) enables planetary-scale geospatial analyses, allowing real world scenarios to be operationally tackled.