This use case focuses on enhancing the exploitation of EO datasets and the EO4EU platform as a service to improve prevention and response capabilities within Civil Protection services. It supports the end-to-end management of operations, from risk nowcasting and short-term prevention planning to daily service activities and the coordination of responses to major emergencies. Based on a proven, geographic, Civil Protection Decision Support System provided by IES Solutions - now Webgenesys - this UC#7 aims at showcasing EO-driven improvements in the real-time management of natural and Man-made risks.

Challenge

When Control Rooms deal with an earthquake, targeted and timely available information – both still and forecasted – requires being automatically updated and displayed to help in the response phase. To date, this is mostly done by manually adding the appropriate layer when the information becomes available: which is generally late for dealing with other dynamic events, such as Forest Fires, Landslides or flash floods, just to quote the natural events. To date, many kinds of EO data, at various levels of spatial and temporal resolution, are available and beneficial for managing material and human resources that are deployed in emergencies, provided that they are geographic, precise in space and time, timely delivered and complete. The civil protection services provided by the EO4EU platform must be easily accessible from all virtual control rooms.

Solution

This use case aims at improving efficiency, precision and timeliness of Civil Protection activities by addressing the need of timely targeted reaction to dynamic events, such as Forest Fires, Earthquakes, Landslides or flash floods, common in the Mediterranean region. The use case will benefit of high- to very high-refresh EO4EU services to detect, track and automatically present to Users satellite derived information appropriate for dealing with the specific event/emergency. The need for timeliness and robust, systematic repeat requires fully unsupervised processes, to be end-to-end satisfied by the EO4EU’s AI and ML solutions grafted on information extracted from present and future-day, 24/7 spaceborne EO services, and maps of relevant semi-static parameters released with yearly or seasonal refresh frequencies. 

Current status

Based on the established Jixel platform (www.jixel.eu), a Civil Protection Decision Support System, a prototype for a high-resolution wildfire risk assessment system has been developed. This system provides daily risk assessments for 24, 48, and 72 hours, mapping the susceptibility of vegetation fires to spread across the 391 municipalities of Sicily. The prototype has undergone rigorous testing against several benchmarks and has since been expanded to cover all regions of Europe. It has successfully been implemented for two additional regions in Greece which results are being tested against the EO-detected, fire Hot Spots reported by the NASA service FIRMS and the Copernicus EMS EFFIS.  

The service will be available on the EO4EU platform, which is designed to collect and preprocess all necessary EO datasets before invoking the external core risk forecasting algorithm developed within the prototype. The resulting risk maps can be visualized in EO4EU's virtual reality environment.  

At this stage, the integration with the platform is still in progress. 

To use EO4EU's civil protection services, the virtual control rooms will have to pre-upload once the local, contextual data needed to the risk forecast calculation. Dedicated API are available within the platform.