Water is increasingly recognized as the most relevant resource of the 21th century, and UN Water recommends in sustainable water investments to prevent future conflicts. Significant social and economical impacts are associated with changes of water quality in inland waters. It is almost impossible to think, in the 21st Century, that water industries and governments would produce sustainable economic and ecological development plans on water without reasonable information on hand. Accordingly, an increasing demand from water industries, including aquaculture, water construction or dam operators, insurers, development banks and water agencies on actual or long-term historic water related information is observed. The eoFRESH service responds to the increasing demand with an independent multi-satellite based monitoring solution, as only traditional in-situ methodologies are capable neither to retrieve historic information, nor to provide actual harmonized information for a huge number of inland waters. eoFRESH combines the monitoring capabilities of an increasing number of historic, actual and future satellite missions, allowing nowadays up to daily global observations and going back in time for 30 years for millions of water bodies and rivers globally. eoFRESH starts with the provision of relevant globally harmonized water quality measures (e.g. turbidity and related suspended matter, phytoplankton concentration). The service is characterised by three key features: Independency with globally harmonized and valid and consistent measures, extremely cost-efficiency through fully automated production on free accessible satellite missions, extremely easy information uptake through access from web-services and applications. Within the Phase 1 feasibility study it is the core intention to summarize all the necessary information, including technical and economic aspects which are relevant to provide a sound roadmap to bring the eoFRESH service to the market.

Hydropower as the world’s largest source of renewable energy still has a high unused potential to be explored in times of a changing global energy policy. The economic and ecological evaluation of new hydropower developments rely on a number of environmental conditions, such as key hydrological parameters. For example, the major drivers of the reservoir storage capacity over time, reservoir life time, and also a major driver of the operations costs are directly related to the sediment regime and sediment trapping. HYPOS is catalyzing innovation with an operational service for appropriate environmental and economic investment planning and monitoring based on Earth Observation (EO) technologies and modelling for the Hydropower industry. The to developed online accessible Decision Support Tool will provide essential assets for hydro power managers, planners and decision makers in their work. The subscription portal brings together high-quality satellite based measurements for historic time periods, actual current monitoring, up-to-date modelled hydrological parameters, with nowcasting on various orderable levels of detail and available in-situ data for integrated baseline and environmental impact assessments. The service significantly contributes on a trans-national as well as a global scale, with the requirement of independent, standardized and consistent information over a wide range of different water bodies and spatial scales. Substantial Blue Footprint analysis are enabled based on sophisticated and state-of-the-art algorithms and methodology featuring sustainable long-term monitoring solutions.

BASE-platform provides an innovative service for satellite derived bathymetric data for a broad range of users through a commercial service platform. Bathymetry is the measure of the water depth similar to underwater topography. BASE-platform has the ambition to establish a commercial service platform for bathymetric data, which is sharpened to user needs and provides most easy access. Its impact is expected to significantly influence the current market, its survey methodologies and the way bathymetric data can be accessed and used. Up-to date bathymetric data are essential for multiple purposes such as navigation, port and offshore construction, security, coastal zone management, fishery, cruising and tourism and required accordingly by various user groups. Conventional survey methods are either ship or airplane based and costly and time consuming. For these reasons, extended areas of shallow and deep water areas in Europe and worldwide are not mapped within an adequate accuracy or existing data are out of date. Earth Observation data, especially the Copernicus mission will play a key role to overcome this lack of data. BASE-platform focuses on Satellite Derived Bathymetry (SDB) as an innovative, rapid and cost effective approach to determine bathymetry from space. SDB in combination with hydrodynamic models to minimize tidal effects and crowd sourced bathymetric for validation purposes will provide those data. The BASE-platform service will be accessible through a commercial platform, which includes relevant components for a sustainable and client focused business. The services will be demonstrated, validated and improved in use cases. Relevant key players are involved for this purpose. The economic benefits of this new EO service will be analysed in a business analysis and model. Finally several dissemination actions will race awareness and increase the potential client group.