Driving The Upstream and Downstream Evolution for Climate Services Through the Elicitation of Users' Requirements: A Virtuous Process for a User-Driven EO Ecosystem

Advancing user skills to employ Earth Observation (EO) data in Climate activities does not only involve the exploitation of current EO constellation, sensors, data, platforms and services; but also, their future evolution. While the use of existing data depends on awareness, uptake, training and information, the evolution of the current EO offer poses several challenges strongly depending on the involvement of the user community.

Particularly, given the challenges posed by climate change and under the new prerogatives of the national recovery and resilience plan, the Italian government aims at creating a new integrated and coherent EO ecosystem fully exploiting the potential of current and future satellite data, and the related Ground segment and services.

To reach this goal a preliminary design of the upstream and downstream system architecture has been developed: the study includes a tentative configuration of the EO constellation, its downstream component, and the Marketplace design. The new EO ecosystem is meant to fulfill both institutional needs, ensuring the development of anchor tenancies, and private ones, triggering the growth of geospatial industries.

The primary goal of this research is to develop a new integrated and coherent EO ecosystem working synergically with the existing EO offer and strictly user-driven through the implementation of co-design and co-development principles.

While the new constellation will benefit several application domains, this study is focused on users interested in climate related activities, including forecasting and monitoring of drivers, emergency and post emergency response, policies planning and managing. As a proof of concept, the study will report on services ranging from coastal monitoring to crop classification and top soil texture detection, synergistically using hyperspectral and radar data.

One of the main achievements of this work is a higher involvement of users and a deeper understanding of their operational processes and capabilities as well as a successful uptake of the derived services and a favorable return on investment. This study contributes to the architectural design of a new constellation, IRIDE, featuring both optical and radar sensors complementing the current EO monitoring offer for the downstream sector development.