GMES
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What is GMES
GMES (Global Monitoring for Environment and Security) is a European initiative for the implementation of information services dealing with environment and security.
GMES will be based on observation data received from Earth observation satellites and ground based information. These data will be coordinated, analysed and prepared for end-users.
Through GMES the state of our environment and its short, medium and long-term evolution will be monitored to support policy decisions or investments.
GMES is a set of services for European citizens helping to improve their quality of life regarding environment and security.
GMES will be built up gradually: it starts with a pilot phase which targets the availability of a first set of operational GMES services by 2008 followed by the development of an extended range of services which meet user requirements.
GMES is jointly set-up by
the European Commission and the European Space Agency (ESA) as an initiative to provide independent, operational
and relevant information in support of a range of
primarily environmental policies serving sustainable
objectives. The “S” in GMES is also meant to support
objectives linked to the implementation of a Common
Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP). The GMES
“initial period” ran from 2001–2003 and featured a
couple of studies and pilot projects as well as “user
consultation meetings” both held by the European
Commission, ESA and national organisations. The
GMES action plan for 2004–2008, both agreed by
the European Parliament and ESA, defines the
path for the implementation of a European capacity
for GMES by 2008. A joint ESA and EU GMES
Advisory Council (GAC) and a GMES Project Office
(GPO) were set-up in Brussels, Belgium, and
an action plan has been defined in July 2004. One
of the challenging goals is to define the financing of
GMES beyond its initial phases. Among the financing
proposals discussed would be a joint undertaking
between ESA and the Commission, such as installed
with the Galileo satellite navigation system.
Parallel to these activities, ESA initiated already
in 2000 the Earth Observation Market Development
(EOMD) programme. Since then EOMD has
launched more than 40 demonstrator projects in order
to strengthen Europe’s industrial capacity for providing
geo-information services, primarily based on
earth observation data.
From years of research in the fields of science and technology associated with the observation and the understanding of the processes and phenomena of the terrestrial environment derived in 1998 the idea to launch GMES. By a combination of measurements at terrestrial level and from space, it rapidly became clear that new operational services could be offered in fields such as oceanography, precise mapping of land use, rapid mapping at times of emergency for the civil protection field or air quality monitoring.
Today, the progressive implementation of GMES is jointly supported by the European Commission (representing the 25 (+2) Member States of the European Union) and the European Space Agency (ESA), which complements the activities and investments of all the European actors involved in understanding our planet with the development of the Space Component of GMES.
GMES will provide the basis for structures able to assemble the measurements, have the means of their acquisition and treatment, and make them easy to share and exploit by a large number of users.
The services provided by GMES can be classified in three major categories:
- Mapping, including topography or road maps but also land-use and harvest, forestry monitoring, mineral and water resources that do contribute to short and long-term management of territories and natural resources. This service generally requires exhaustive coverage of the Earth surface, archiving and periodic updating of data.
- Support for emergency management in case of natural hazards and particularly civil protection institutions responsible for the security of people and property. This service concentrates on the provision of the latest possible data before intervening.
- Forecasting is applied for marine zones, air quality or crop yields. This service systematically provides data on extended areas permitting the prediction of short, medium or long-term events, including their modelling and evolution.
The widespread and regular availability of technical data within GMES will allow a more efficient use of the infrastructures and human resources. It will help the creation of new models for security and risk management, as well as better management of land and resources.
Initial period (2001-2003)
The work programme in the Initial Period has been performed through complementary activities of the EC and the ESA and encompasses two main strands:
- Strand 1 Delivering Information and Services, which included the EC thematic projects and the consolidation phase of the ESA GMES Services Element (GSE);
- Strand 2 Assessments and Recommendations, which stemmed from the cross-cutting assessment studies.
Implementation period (2004-2008)
The GMES capacity is based on four inter-related components as represented by the GMES diamond:
- Services;
- Observations from space;
- In-situ (including airborne) observations;
- Data integration and information management capacity.
From the users' perspective, the priority component is the provision of services to fulfil the policy and users' needs. The range of services available by 2008 will be developed progressively.
The provision of services relies on the space and in-situ components that capture the required data. In addition, access to socio-economic and other statistical data will be important in order to provide the maximum added value to the services foreseen.
The data integration and information management will enable user access and the sharing of information. These components will be developed in conjunction with the set of services that are required. Such a 'build-as-you-need' approach requires GMES to retain a modular open system approach that can easily accommodate new elements. [1]
GMES services
GMES is defined to be driven by the demands for
geo-information services of its stakeholders. These are
primarily identified in the various European, national
and regional public services and agencies, which require
up-to-date and reliable environmental information
on European and global land, air and sea areas.
Depending on the needs of entities such as urban
communities or the European Environmental Agency
(EEA), the region of interest could cover small towns
or the entire globe. The utilisation of earth observation
data for several kinds of scientific and pre-operational
needs was addressed by the European Commissions
5th and moreover 6th framework programme on research
for quite some time. Specifically under the
headline of GMES more than 20 thematic projects
are co-funded by the European Commission. The topics
of these projects range from land cover change
and environmental stress in Europe, to global vegetation
and atmosphere monitoring, support to regional development aid, risk and crisis management and information
technologies. Due to the “shared-funding”
approach of the Commission projects, the Commission
defines the administrative scheme, but leaves the technical
management and the development of the further
operations and hence the sustainability of the services
to the project partners.
ESA approached the challenge to built sustainable
GMES services by a phased engineering approach. A
call for tender under ESA’s EarthWatch programme in
2002 demanded bidders what ESA called “GMES Service
Elements (GSE)” to comply with a required management
and extensive document structure. Whereas
the management set-up made sure that real users of
the delivered geoinformation products are involved in
the project, the documentation tree insured the comparison
between the projects and the tabulation of requirements,
infrastructure and business plans. For the
latter, the socio-economic benefit is of equal importance
as the pure commercial revenue. Table 2 gives
an overview of the current ESA GSE projects.
The ESA GSE also listed the requirements on
satellite information for their services. Medium resolution
and Landsat-alike optical and ERS-alike radar
data is required to service general European mapping
demands for land cover analysis and change,
vegetation and environmental monitoring of land and
coastal areas. VHR data both of optical and SAR
origin is required, when a more detailed regional
analysis is demanded as a spot check, or when local
small scale phenomena need to me mapped. The
RESPOND (Humanitarian aid) and URBAN services
are the leading services in demand for VHR based information. Under the latter several European
cities—including those of the new European Union
member states—have been mapped by the pre-cursor
demonstration services.
By mid 2004, 12 operational GSEprojects are running
and 10 of them will finish the first consolidation
phase by end of 2004. Two—RESPOND and
PROMOTE—started a bit later. Following this consolidation
phase, ESA—in co-ordination with the Commission
funded projects—will select a number of services
in early 2005 to go into full operations by 2007. While these phases are still funded by ESA,
the service partners shall work towards a financing
of follow-on operations by the users of this information.
It is clear that the services related to environment
and treaty monitoring can only be financed by
European or national government level ministries, demanding
the high level information for their administrative
work. The medium and high resolution earth
observation data required for these services will, to a
large extend, be delivered by satellite systems owned by the public and European entities.
The VHR data for demands on precise mapping and
local verification will mostly be born out of private or
PPP (public private partnership) systems. Such systems will be established
in Europe in the next years. Here, private operators
are asked to recover their costs—if not the costs of
the entire satellite and the follow-on system—by the
commercial sales of the data. The commercial VHR
operators are expecting larger scale contracts by national
and European military entities. But is still unclear,
by which contractual and financial agreements
GMES services will obtain the necessary VHR data.
New business models are currently under discussion
by the private operators and the GMES entities. General
data purchase contracts, such as the US NextView
programme, servicing military demands, could also be
envisioned to serve European civil and security needs. [2]
Definition of product scenarios
From the analysis of application issues and requirements,
nine candidate products and services were
derived and, irrespective of their actual state of
operational development, described as product scenarios
which were to serve as a common baseline for
efficiency evaluation (Table 1).
Besides the user demand as outlined above, the
following aspects were also decisive for defining the
product scenarios:
- synergy potential through multi-task usability (utilisation synergy);
- programmatic potential for operational implementation (e.g. regarding the ongoing Service Consolidation Actions within ESA’s Earthwatch GSE programme);
- technical feasibility, including present or near future availability of suitable SRS data;
- avoidance of unrealistic financial conditions (e.g. no coverage of the total federal territory with maximum resolution SRS data).
The resulting set of product/service scenarios comprised
two basic land surface data products:
- an enhanced land cover information system (CORINE Land Cover level 4) based on Landsat/Landsat follow-on and other optical multi-spectral satellite data;
- an area-wide Digital Terrain Model (DTM) based on ERS-1/ERS-2 tandem radar data.
Seven additional monitoring services were defined to
cover specific requirements regarding
- UV irradiation;
- eutrophication in the Northern and Baltic Seas (chlorophyll monitoring);
- the pollution load of inland waters;
- urban development and soil sealing;
- the agricultural crop situation on a given date (addressing requirements of BfS for impact assessment in case of nuclear disaster);
- forests (afforestation, deforestation, reforestation);
- habitat changes.
The parameters of the monitoring services on water pollution, urban development and forests were defined according to the service portfolios developed in the GSE projects SAGE and Forest Monitoring, both of which UBA has joined as a user-side project partner. [3]
References
[2] G.Schreier, S.Dech
"High resolution Earth observation satellites and services in the next decade - A european perspective".
[3] R.Backhaus, B.Beule
"Efficiency evaluation of satellite data products in environmental policy".
