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Talks and Poster Presentations (without Proceedings-Entry):

W. Wagner, M. Enenkel, G. Treibnig, G. Wotawa:
"Global hydrological monitoring and science support service platform - Investigations into viable concepts for an Earth Observation Data Centre for Water Resources Monitoring";
Poster: Österreichischer GEO/GEOSS Workshop, Österreichischer GEO/GEOSS Workshop, Bundesministerium für Wissenschaft und Forschung (BMWF); 2012-12-10.



English abstract:
Steadily growing demands for water, food and energy are putting global water resources increasingly under pressure. This pressure is particularly being felt during prolonged periods of extreme weather as the recent examples of the 2003 heatwave in Western Europe, the 2010 flood in Pakistan and the 2012 droughts in Eastern Europe and the United States have brought to the publicīs attention. Unfortunately, such climatic extremes are expected to increase in frequency as well as in severity due to global warming. It thus becomes increasingly important to manage water resources in an efficient manner, requiring advanced models fed with more and better observational data for monitoring and prediction.
Earth observation (EO) holds a huge potential for water resources monitoring, yet - as is the case for many other application domains - it continues to be underutilized in practice. The most important reason for this underutilisation is that EO missions typically have stopped short at delivering just "images", while users require operational higher-level EO data products that can be readily ingested into their models. Unfortunately, the importance and technical difficulties of developing and operating such higher-level EO processing chains had not been sufficiently recognised in the past, leading to a sub-optimal use of pubic investments into EO programmes, a structural deficit which is still being felt today.
Information Technology (IT) is normally not being regarded to pose significant challenges to the implementation of EO programmes. Yet, this perception couldnīt be more wrong for several reasons. The first reason is that the IT infrastructures of most EO missions have not provided a suitable framework for connecting science, development and operations. However, this aspect is essential for any EO mission because without scientific innovation any EO data product is quickly superseded by new, better performing products. Secondly, processing facilities were in general not powerful enough to perform regular reprocessing of the complete satellite data archives to make sure that users always get access to the latest version of the satellite data products.
The increasing need for EO data on water resources and the current lack of operational EO processing capabilities create a unique opportunity for Austria to position itself as one of the important players for the operations of the next generation of Europeīs satellites. So far, a contribution of Austria to this space sector has not been explicitly foreseen. However, Austria has a small but strong group of academic, institutional and commercial organisations that could combine the scientific and technical expertise required for this task. By co-operating these EO expert organisations could create the critical mass required to be able to take on the responsibility for specific EO ground processing and service segments. By taking this step Austria would belong to the first group of countries to make the strategic decision to support the establishment of operational EO application services for the upcoming Sentinel missions.

Created from the Publication Database of the Vienna University of Technology.