The Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) is implemented by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) together with a network of over 60 contractor entities distributed in most European countries. CAMS delivers operationally a wide range of information products and services on air quality, emissions and surface fluxes, solar radiation and climate forcings.
All CAMS outputs are unrestricted and provided free-of-charge to users worldwide. They are routinely used by broadcast TV bulletins, by leading print and online news media outlets, and by websites and smartphone apps. They underpin a number of public and commercial information services. And, importantly, they are used by institutional users in European Member States and Copernicus collaborating countries, as well as at European (EEA, EU Directorates General in CAMS thematic scope...) and international levels (WMO, IPCC, WHO...).
The presentation will jog through some of the key achievements of CAMS during the period 2014-2021, discussing particularly the impact that the uptake of Sentinel-5P and Sentinel-3 data has had, and illustrating how CAMS information products have helped during certain major environmental events (ozone holes, wildfires, volcanic eruptions, air quality episodes including changes during COVID...).
Subsequently, the main evolutions foreseen for the second phase of Copernicus running until 2028 will be highlighted. Key new topics are a National Collaboration Programme allowing a closer engagement with European countries particularly on environmental policy aspects and the development of a portfolio of observations-based emissions product including a CO2 anthropogenic emissions Monitoring and Verification Support capacity (CO2MVS). The CO2MVS will be a key contribution of Copernicus to the European Green Deal. We will discuss how the upcoming Copernicus missions dedicated to atmospheric composition, especially Sentinel-4, Sentinel-5 and CO2M will unlock new products and enhance the quality of the existing products.

A look into the future of the Copernicus Emergency Management Service

Authors: Peter Salamon, Jean-Francois Pekel, Peter Spruyt, Marco Broglia, Jesus San Miguel-Ayanz, Andrea Toreti, Thomas Kemper, Alessandra Zampieri, Tom de Groeve (1), Attilio Gambardella (2), Olimpia Imperiali (3)

(1) European Commission, DG Joint Research Centre, Ispra, Italy,
(2) European Commission, DG Defense Industry and Space, Brussels, Belgium
(3) European Commission, DG European Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations, Brussels, Belgium

Countries feel a growing concern about their increasing vulnerability and exposure to disasters. With climate change, future impacts of weather-related disasters are likely to rise. Efforts at all levels are ongoing to reduce the potential and actual impact of disasters with the Union Civil Protection Mechanism and the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction being the most important policy frameworks at European and global level.

The Copernicus Emergency Management Service (CEMS), provides information and analysis for supporting emergency management of different types of disasters, induced by meteo-climate hazards, geophysical hazards, deliberate and accidental man-made threats as well as to humanitarian crises. It covers all phases of the disaster risk management cycle, i.e. prevention, preparedness, response and recovery.

CEMS, which is implemented by the Joint Research Center of the European Commission together with the DG for European Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations (ECHO) and DG for Defense and Space Industry (DEFIS), was one of the first Copernicus services to become operational with the Rapid Mapping, Risk & Recovery Mapping and the European Flood Awareness System components starting its services in 2012. Subsequently, the other components, Validation, European Forest Fire Information System, Global Flood Awareness System and European and Global Drought Observatories were added in the following years.

The evolution of CEMS is intrinsic to its implementation. All CEMS tools are the result of the operational implementation of processes and tools that were initially tested in research programs and projects and rely on extensive user interaction and feedback. As the implementation of CEMS is based on the most advanced knowledge on the fields of modeling and remote sensing, CEMS is bound to be continuously evolving through the implementation of new knowledge in the field, the incorporation of data from new satellite and airborne remote sensing platforms and sensors and by the efficient implementation of highly computing intensive processes in the most advanced data processing platforms. CEMS activities are highly connected to new developments carried out within the JRC, the EU Research and Innovation Programme Horizon Europe, creating synergies with other Copernicus services as well as relevant international networks and initiatives.

Two recent examples of CEMS evolution are the new global flood monitoring product and the adding of the new exposure mapping component to the already existing on-demand mapping and early warning and monitoring components. The new global flood monitoring product represents a significant advancement for the continuous monitoring of floods worldwide by immediately processing and analysing all incoming S-1 Interferometric wide swath data in a fully automatic way and making use of the data cube approach enabling a high product timeliness and the implementation of flood mapping algorithms that require data-driven model training. The new exposure mapping component provides highly accurate information derived from satellite and in-situ data on the presence of settlements, its related infrastructure and population which is fundamental to adequately measure the impact of disasters and improve disaster risk management. Further planned evolutions of CEMS include the expansion of the European wildfire information system to the global scale as well as the integration of data from unmanned-manned aerial vehicles as a complementary data source for the rapid mapping of disasters.

With the signature of the new contribution agreement with the European Commission in July 2021, ECMWF has kicked off the new phase of the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S). After a rapid development stage the service became fully operational at the end of 2018 and it now serves over 110,000 user all over the world. C3S gives access to a variety of data, information and insights about the past, present and future climate. These ranges from in-situ observations, remotely sensed essential climate variables, regional and global reanalyses, climate predictions, initialised and non-initialised global and regional projections. In additional to the provision of operational access to quality controlled climate data, C3S offers access to tools, workflows and procedures which allow the users to extract the specific information they need in their specific activities. Climate has rarely been so central in the public discourse as it is now. This relevance is translating into an hunger for climate-smart solutions based on quantitative data about the present and future climate. Over the last few years C3S demonstrated how climate data can be transformed into sector specific insights for activities as different as finance, insurance, agriculture or health. Such an approach will remains the backbone of the service for the next decade.
The talks offers an opportunity to present the basic structure of the service and its expected evolution. The presentation will showcase how such an infrastructure managed to successfully serve the users the programme targeted. The talk will also provides a review of some of the most noticeable limitations of the current approach and some of the key lessons learnt during Copernicus 1. The experience gained during the first phase of the programme (2015-2021) has been used to inform the setup and the technical solution that will be adopted during the second phase. The presentation will describe some of those and will reflect on the role C3S will play in the rapidly evolving European climate service landscape.

The Copernicus Marine Service implemented by Mercator Ocean International (MOi) provides operational, regular, and systematic reference information on blue/white/green ocean state for the global ocean and European regional seas. The service is unique in the world for its coverage and comprehensiveness; its balance between state-of-the-art science and operational commitments; and the consistency of its portfolio where satellite and in situ observations, and 3D model simulations are proposed in coherence to describe, monitor, and forecast the ocean sate. Thirty-five thousand expert downstream services and users are connected to the service. The Copernicus Marine Service responds to public and private user needs and supports policies related to all marine and maritime sectors.

An overview of Copernicus Marine Service achievements for the last 6 years and a status of the service will be given. The Copernicus Marine Service makes an extensive use of satellite data from the Sentinel missions (S1, S2, S3 and S6). The essential role and uptake of present and future Sentinel missions will be specifically discussed.

Drivers and plans for Copernicus 2 (2021-2027) will then be presented. The objective is to further establish Copernicus Marine Service products as a worldwide reference, continue to foster the service uptake and respond to increasing and pressing user and policy needs for improved ocean monitoring and prediction capabilities. The strategy consists in (i) affirming further the marine value and identity of the service to reach users beyond the known horizon and reinforce the European Union as a global actor for the ocean; (ii) maintaining the excellence of a cutting-edge service capacity for describing the marine environment; (iii) reinforcing a pan-European network of highly skilled providers of data and information; and (iv) re-enforcing cooperation and synergies with the other Copernicus services. MOi in close interaction with the European Commission and member states and with the advice of its scientific and user committees has developed an ambitious plan for the next 7 years that allows a staged implementation depending on budget implementation, user needs and priorities and feasibility/maturity. Three levels of implementation have been identified: baseline, enhanced continuity and new services. Baseline will be implemented from the start of Copernicus 2 to ensure the continuity of the present service. The enhanced continuity and new services streams will build from present and future H2020 and Horizon Europe R&D projects and will be developed depending on budget and priorities. A strong priority is, in particular, to offer new services for the coastal ocean through a co-design and co-development approach between the EU Copernicus Marine Service and coastal marine services operated by member states.

The challenging issues to establish a comprehensive monitoring and forecasting of the global ocean requires international cooperation. MOi and the Copernicus Marine Service have set up important partnerships over the past 6 years (e.g. GOOS and IOC, EuroGOOS and EOOS, OceanPredict, GEO and GEO Blue Planet, G7 FSOI). The UN Decade of Ocean Science will be a unique opportunity to develop further this required international cooperation.

The Copernicus Land Monitoring Service provides geographical information on land cover, land use, land cover-use changes over the years, vegetation state or water cycle. The service is implemented by the European Environment Agency (EEA) and the Joint Research Centre (JRC) since 2011.

The JRC manages the global component of the Service, while EEA oversees the technical coordination of the pan-European component. Further to a suite of high frequent medium resolution products with global coverage, the pan-European and priority area monitoring components of the CLMS produce time series of land cover/land use (LC/LU) information, some of which go back to the 1990s.

Some of the CLMS products, with an update frequency ranging from 3 to 6 years have proven to be of great use in terms of change monitoring. With the launch of a High Resolution Layer on Crop Types within the HRL Vegetated Land Cover Characteristics (HRL-VLCC), CLMS moves into annual updates. With the launch of the High Resolution Snow and Ice service (HR-S&I) and of the High Resolution Vegetation Phenology and Productivity (HR-VPP), the CLMS entered the era of Near Real Time (NRT) provision of geospatial information on Land Cover and Land Cover Change.

The production of a follow-up product for Corine Land Cover (CLC), i.e. the CLC+ and its suite of products, further broadens and deepens land monitoring information provided by the CLMS, by the inclusion of Land Use information according to the EAGLE data model, and mainly provided by the Member States and participating countries. The CLC+ Core database is designed such that a variety of LC data sources, mainly provided via CLMS products as well as LU data sources, mainly originating from in situ data, can be ingested in the database, and will allow the creation of CLC+ Instances, i.e. tailored geospatial data towards the support of specific use cases, such as policies in the European Green Deal (EGD).

The evolution of the CLMS products has been designed to give support EU environment and climate change policies. Specific attention is given to the monitoring of Land Use, Land Use Change and Forestry (LULUCF) in view of the EU Climate policy, the monitoring of Good Agro-Ecological Conditions (GAECs) as part of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), the EU BioDiversity strategy, or the sustainable urban development. These key use cases have urged the CLMS to address and exploit novel information extraction techniques, such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML) or Deep Learning (DL), which are being implemented on the Copernicus WEkEO Data and Information Access Service (DIAS).

In the area of border surveillance, the main objectives are the detection and prevention of irregular migration and cross border crime, as well as contributing to saving lives at sea. The implementation of this service is entrusted to the European Border and Coast Guard (FRONTEX). The delivered products support the EU’s external border surveillance information exchange framework (EUROSUR) by providing near real time data on what is happening on land and at sea around the EU’s borders.

In the area of maritime surveillance, the overall objective of the service is to support Europe's maritime security objectives and related activities in the maritime domain. The corresponding challenges mainly relate to safety of navigation, support to fisheries control, combatting marine pollution and law enforcement at sea. The implementation of this service is entrusted to the European Maritime Safety Agency.

The support to EU External Actions component assists the EU in its external operations, providing decision makers with geo-information on remote, difficult to access areas, where security issues are at stake. It targets mainly European users but it can also be activated by key International stakeholders, as appropriate under EU International cooperation agreements. The implementation of this service is entrusted to the European Union Satellite Centre.

The presentation will explain how these services function, what are their planned evolutions, and illustrate some of their products and use cases.