Water use cases

SeaCras uses high-resolution satellites to monitor sustainable coastal waters, with a focus on transparent and near-shallow coastal waters found in the Mediterranean Sea. They rely on Copernicus program and Sentinel missions, particularly Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2. SeaCras acquires on-site data for complex coastal water locations to obtain a structured database for training AI models, improving satellite-derived estimates of water constituents. Their solutions provide value-added services for maritime spatial planning, marine protected areas, sustainable tourism, energy, and maritime transport. SeaCras delivers monthly reports and yearly studies on the eutrophication and water quality levels of Croatia's national and natural parks, enabling leadership to make data-driven decisions. They aim to fill the gap between the EU blue economy value chain and the satellite industry, expanding to potential markets across Europe and beyond.

One of the most critical issues for water companies is the impact of water scarcity on the environment and their ability to deliver their services to customers. With it come decisions such as whether demand restrictions (e.g. a hosepipe ban) or drought permits (e.g. emergency abstractions) may have to be implemented and when such measures might come into force. Use of seasonal rainfall forecasts could help inform such decisions, giving greater lead time for mitigating action.

The forecasting tool to assess the impact of drought conditions on water resources has been designed to support water companies in managing their resources during drought conditions. Based on C3S data, the user-friendly tool allows users to view and analyse seasonal rainfall forecasts and explore their accuracy in predicting upcoming droughts. The landing page features a map with a grid representing the spatial resolution of the forecast data and overlay showing water resource zone boundaries. Users can click on a grid cell to launch a graph displaying observed and forecasted rainfall data for the past and coming six months. The graph also includes Long Term Average (LTA) rainfall values and drought threshold indicators used by water companies. In addition, the analysis presents verification metrics to help users understand how well the forecasts have performed in the past. The tool has the potential to be integrated into water resource managers' daily operations and planning.

Development of a new coastal flood awareness system that could become a candidate to join the Copernicus suite of services. The Copernicus European Flood Awareness System (EFAS), managed by the Copernicus Emergency Service (CEMS), provides solutions for inland flooding in Europe, but until then, there was no service for marine flooding in coastal areas.

The European Coastal Flood Awareness System (ECFAS) brings a new dimension to CEMS by complementing what existed for river and runoff flooding with tools for coastal marine flooding. The ECFAS proof-of-concept consists of an awareness system for coastal areas (preparedness phase) and impact assessment products (response phase), fundamental for effective recovery and prevention. The aim is that ECFAS becomes one of Copernicus’ core Emergency Management Services. ECFAS has 3 main components: • Warning system • Rapid Mapping • Risk and recovery mapping

ECFAS relies on Copernicus core services products such as Earth Observation and other data (e.g. geomorphology, hydrology), as well as numerical models (flood models and regional forecasts of water level and wave) and in-situ measurements (tide gauges and buoys) as well as information on the imperviousness of soil to refine the parametrization of flood models.

There is a need to understand how climate change will affect coastal flooding in Ireland and what decision-making challenges may benefit from easily accessible climate information.

Coastal flooding studies in Ireland have been carried out using simplified assumptions due to the lack of a metocean dataset for future climate scenarios at the national scale. The new dataset includes full time series for relevant variables, providing end users with a better understanding of the impact of climate change along the Irish coast. To this end, the sea level and storm surge climate impact indicators provided by C3S have been used to improve coastal strategy and climate resilience adaptation measures. The outputs will be used to update policy documents, including the national Climate Change Sectoral Adaptation Plan for Flood Risk Management, flood risk management plans, and erosion risk management plans.

Hydropower producers rely on inflow forecasts and scenarios to plan their production, and climate change may affect river flow. The Luleälven River in Sweden is regulated for hydropower by Vattenfall, which needs information on future inflow to reservoirs for short- and long-term planning. The Copernicus Climate Change Service hydrological model ensembles for Water demonstrator project, enabling the evaluation of climate scenarios against local records. The results showed that future climate change would impact water volume and seasonal distribution in the Luleälven River, with an earlier flow peak from snow melt. This methodology and access to long records of daily data and several climate scenarios could be applied to similar studies for other rivers.

The Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) has been monitoring a large plume of Saharan dust moving north across southern and central Europe since 2022. CAMS has been tracking all stages of dust transport from the Sahara Desert this year. By monitoring this CAMS can note and predict plumes of dust travelling across the Europe considering their values of aerosol optical depth (AOD) and dust concentrations. The severity of this year’s dust transport, including the high values seen over western Europe during mid-March as well as dust crossing the Atlantic, heading towards the Caribbean, has been continuously updated by CAMS. The data and tools provided by CAMS are free-to-use, and can help citizens, businesses, and policymakers make informed decisions with 24/7 air quality forecast data.

Urban areas are facing a serious air pollution problem with over 80% of people in these areas exposed to unhealthy air quality levels, according to the World Health Organization. Policymakers have identified urban air pollution as a pressing environmental challenge, but addressing it requires accounting for global-scale effects while providing information at a local level. S[&]T and KNMI have developed AIR-Portal to meet this challenge - an air quality dashboard for urban areas that combines CAMS regional and global data, land use, and local monitoring data to generate high-resolution air quality forecasts. AIR-Portal is a unique service that can address urban air quality issues all over the world. The accuracy of its outputs is tested against local observations.

River freshwater inputs are crucial in ocean modelling. They improve sea surface salinity estimations near coastlines and enhance large-scale ocean circulation predictions. Currently, most ocean models rely on climatological river discharge data. However, these have various deficiencies and lead to biases when simulating ocean states.

Large-scale hydrological models - such as the ones used in the European and Global Flood Awareness Systems (EFAS & GloFAS) of the Copernicus Emergency Management Service (CEMS) - provide state-of-the-art European/global flood forecasts and downstream river discharge. These systems provide river discharge datasets with an unprecedented temporal (GloFAS: daily/ EFAS: 6 hourly) and spatial resolution. This is possible thanks to the atmospheric reanalysis ERA5 (GloFAS) or gridded meteorological observations (EFAS) as meteorological forcing and the calibrated, open-source hydrological model LISFLOOD.

The river discharge datasets contain a re-analysis dataset reaching back until 1980 and near-real time river discharge forecasts that are currently being integrated into the operational CMEMS ocean models. Linking CEMS’ river discharge provided with ocean models used for CMEMS products allows us to improve and strengthen the connection and coupling between ocean and land surface and hydrological models. The river discharge forecasts can be accessed on the relevant EFAS and GloFAS websites or through the Climate Data Store of the C3S.

The Italian National Civil Protection requested the activation of Copernicus On-demand Mapping for pre-disaster situation analyses for four locations in the coastal areas of the Italian regions of Sicilia, Puglia, Basilicata and Calabria.

By converting some building characteristics like the number of floors, building materials or the existing coastal protection measures into scores, the Copernicus team assessed the exposure and vulnerability of buildings and other points of interest (e.g. refinery). This was only possible thanks to the analysis of specific aerial imagery of the areas of interest. These data also allowed suggesting the best locations for evacuation points, safe shelters, field hospitals or helicopter landing spots. Mitigation measures – like the structural reinforcement of existing infrastructures like harbours or roads – were also suggested.

Copernicus is available to keep supporting local administrative authorities improve their national early warning system. Providing information to build response and evacuation plans that minimise casualties in a disaster situation is at the core of the Copernicus Emergency Management service.

The Nouvelle-Aquitaine region features more than 700 km of coastline and presents one of the areas with the most rapid demography mostly focused on the coastal area. Coastal ecosystems are driven by complex interactions where physical processes are controlled mainly by marine forcing ranging from seconds to decades, respectively for waves to tides, winds and seasonal river discharge changes and trends over time. Therefore, nearshore and coastal environments are among the most dynamic and constantly changing on Earth. Whilst these regions play a key role at the land and ocean interface, the state of the sea surface and especially wave breaking prevent easy and safe ground observations. Whilst field observations fail to be exhaustive due to their dynamical and unsecured patterns, frequent and synoptic observations acquired by multispectral optical satellite imagery enables adaptation of coastal observation strategies and management, both for scientist and end-users.