Within the National Observatory of Athens it has been recently established a Centre of Excellence for Earth Observation based monitoring of Natural Disasters in south-eastern Europe, named BEYOND - http://beyond-eocenter.eu/. The Center aims primarily at setting up leading edge integrated observational solutions to operate space-borne and ground-based monitoring networks in a complementary, unified and coordinated manner. The research portfolio covers a broad spectrum of phenomena such as earthquakes, volcanoes, extreme weather events, fires, fire smoke and toxic gasses, emission concentrations, manmade hazards, dust storms, air quality and impacts to human health.

The focus of BEYOND is to assemble technological expertise, know-how and research capacity to seamlessly design innovative processing chains, generate added-value products and develop end-to-end services for disaster management, environmental monitoring and climate change analyses, to serve institutional stakeholders, the scientific community, end-users and the general public, for the benefit of the environment and the society.
This session will provide a thorough insight in the activities undertaken with BEYOND Center of Excellence, giving characteristic examples of applications and products that have been systematically delivered using remotely sensed data sets, on a pre-operational and operational basis. The three thematic pillars of BEYOND will be addressed, namely meteorological and human induced hazards, geo-hazards and atmospheric pollution and air quality.