Characterization of Copernicus EO products for water modelling

This work presents the characterization and performance evaluation of the existing Copernicus EO products for the monitoring and modelling of water bodies dynamics purposes. This study is carried on the Water-ForCE project (https://waterforce.eu/). Water-ForCE (“Water scenarios For Copernicus Exploitation”) is an European H2020 project to develop a Roadmap for Copernicus Inland Water Services, aiming to better integrate the entire inland water cycle within the Copernicus Services.

From the requirements collected in the project through dedicated working group meetings and stakeholders’ consultation, a list of water quality and water quantity variables which are used in water modelling were identified. All of them were related to five types of modelling into water management: biogeochemical models, hydrodynamic models, river models, crop or pasture growth models and landscape water balance models. The availability of water related products in the Copernicus portfolio was analysed by checking and updating the previous water quantity and water quality project inventories.

This work studies their spatial coverage, data discovery and access, file data formats, validation reports, uncertainty indicators and spatial and temporal resolutions and their utility in the mentioned types of water modelling was analysed. Finally, recommendations on improvements of the existing Copernicus products were made based on the cross analysis between the existing features and user needs.

Main conclusions of the work point to the lack of bathymetry and evapotranspiration as well as some specific water quality products, the need of finer spatial resolution for chlorophyll-a in coastal zones and for soil moisture, surface water and snowmelt products, higher temporal resolution for river discharge and groundwater and water quality variables, the need of validation, increase the coherence between in-situ and remote sensing observations and to provide more quality and uncertainty information. Other demands are to uniform marine and lake products, a global (or at least Pan European) coverage for some local/regional products, improvements in data access and data delivery of new formats, and continuous and consistent long-term archives of vegetation and land cover products.