An Intelligent platform for integrating climate services

According to Water Europe statistics, 90% of the global economy and 75% of jobs depend on water, while water-related risks are among the top 5 risks. Τhe term “water” includes both drinkable water (with respect to pollution) and hydrology water modelling (with respect to floods and sea level rise). As a result, the significance of modelling techniques, especially regarding water pollution, coastline management, flood prediction and sea level rise assessment cannot be overstated. Copernicus has already tools to forecast, assess and analyse such domains and also to manage forthcoming emergencies. Indeed, JRC states that Copernicus Emergency Management Service (CEMS) is gaining a lot of traction from policy makers, scientists and public bodies for managing, assessing and preventing climate-related emergencies such as floods and droughts. Despite this trend, the potential of Copernicus data and services, especially for emergency and climate applications has not been fully realised by industrial and policy-making stakeholders. TERRA realises that innovation stemming from Copernicus services and data could set the basis for future collaborations, accelerate R&I progress, and increase the EU’s excellence in cutting-edge technologies. To this end, we target the second R&I area of the “HORIZON-CL4-2024-SPACE-01-35”, namely the “the development of an integrated, harmonized and coherent product provision system … to improve global scale hydrological monitoring and forecasting.” TERRA envisions the creation of several services and product chains that fuse Copernicus services with state-of-the-art technologies to provide solutions for coastline detection, coastline erosion prediction, flood risk assessment and mitigation, water pollution assessment and coastline modelling. Τhe project targets the SWOT mission and Group on Earth Observation objectives, and provides the necessary framework to promote its outcomes through the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS).