Priorities for Research and Innovation for Copernicus

Executive Summary

The desired impacts of the Copernicus Services are to support and develop key policies, monitor their implementation (e.g. to ensure healthy and productive aquatic environments), and deliver actionable information to help the global community attain the Sustainable Development Goals. At the same time, the Services are expected to support downstream business and the European economy through brokerage of additional services, through efficiency gains (e.g. in the water utilities sector), or both. In order to achieve this, processes of user consultation and service evolution are built into the Copernicus Services concept.

As requirements and expectations, as well as space assets evolve, the Copernicus Services have in some areas expanded to a point where transparency and consistency in the product portfolio are no longer in step with technical improvements. The present services can be seen as the result of a continuous technology push, despite efforts to guide development from end-user consultation. This has led to some obvious and some less obvious gaps in product development, requiring further Research, Development and Innovation (RDI) activities to resolve. Meanwhile, product development and validation have not progressed at the same pace as space assets have, resulting in suboptimal uncertainty characterization and lower uptake of products than desired.

Proposed measures to better serve a wide range of user needs include continued development of space assets to meet user needs, and introducing new products, particularly those in high demand in the modelling community seeking to enhance forecasting abilities and climate resilience. More recently, emerging technologies to boost in situ data collection efforts at relatively low cost (uncrewed aerial observation, citizen science, automation) have seen significant development and demonstration activity, which should be introduced more widely to support the services.  

This report contains an overview of the recommendations for improvement to the Copernicus water services landscape, collected over two years through thematic workshops, analysis of the needs of a range of sectors and policy, and  expert consultation. Through this overview, we can corroborate the most pressing challenge areas and recommend immediate and long-term actions for improvement. Whilst this report focuses on analysing Research and Innovation activities, several coordinating and capacity building actions are closely linked and therefore included as well.

Top level findings of this work are as follows:

• Thematic data collections should be created to support a wider use base. These platforms can serve to introduce a wider range of data sources than those originating from the Services, and for capacity building and advanced data analytics. It is recognised that thematic data collections require a degree of harmonization of data and the user experience, which is not presently available.
• The future success of the Copernicus water-related Services is closely tied to its ability to work with and shape in situ data networks, to arrive at an integrated water monitoring solution, deliver products with uncertainty characterisation, and support the introduction of (‘higher-level’) biogeochemical products and the full set of Essential Climate Variables. Near-real time data sharing mechanisms and incentives to in situ data producers are, however, largely lacking.
• New and existing space assets, including those from non-European missions, should be combined to produce the highest possible spatiotemporal products across the land-sea continuum. At the same time, observation challenges in the nearshore area need to be tackled through strategic in situ data collection, improved atmospheric correction procedures, and data analytics. The resulting product selection should provide actionable information to a wide range of sectors including food, drinking water, transport, and assurance.