Implementing National Copernicus services for hydrology and natural hazard monitoring at NVE using Open Source tools Apache Airflow and actinia

The Norwegian Water Resources and Energy Directorate (NVE) is tasked with management of water- and energy resources in Norway, as well as reducing the risk of damages associated with landslides and flooding. Copernicus satellite data can provide valuable insight for those tasks.

The vast amount of Copernicus data however requires scalable and robust solutions for processing. Standardized and modular workflows help safeguarding maintainability and efficiency of service delivery. In order to implement operational Copernicus services at NVE, the Open Source OSGeo Community project actinia was introduced together with the Open Source Apache Airflow software as a platform for delivering operational Copernicus services at national scale.

actinia (https://actinia-org.github.io/) is a REST API for scalable, distributed, and high performance processing of time series of satellite images, as well as geographical raster and vector data. It is a modular system that uses mainly GRASS GIS for computational tasks.

Apache Airflow (https://airflow.apache.org/) is an orchestration solution that allows to programmatically author, schedule and monitor workflows.

In the presentation, we will illustrate how Apache Airflow and actinia work together and present selected examples of current and future applications operationalized on the platform. Those applications cover currently:

• Avalanches
• Flooding
• snow cover
• lake ice

More services related to NVE`s area of responsibility are being investigated, like landslides, slush flows, glacier lake outburst floods, and specific land cover changes...

Finally, we discuss challenges and opportunities of using Open Source Software tools and collaborative science approaches at NVE in national, operational services.