PrimeWater

Emvis has been awarded a grant from the Horizon2020, financed by the European Union

Over the course of the next three years, our consortium of organizations from Europe, North-America and Australia will further advance the use of EarthObservation data for predictive management of hydro-ecological hazards in freshwater ecosystems.

The Horizon2020 funded PrimeWater project is set to develop operational water information services in four full-scale international case studies on three continents. In each case study, different perspectives of the water circle management (water resources management, environmental protection and potable water supply production) are addressed to ensure that PrimeWater meets all specific user requirements. This project thereby continuous and expands the work of the prior SPACE-O project.

“PrimeWater aspires to leverage available Earth Observation data for water quality products to detect timely probable tipping points of lake and reservoir ecosystems.”

A Community of Practice, together with a Virtual Lab for EO Science and a Multi-User Panel for co-development of water quality products, will all together provide opportunities for engagement of a broad range of communities in the PrimeWater project.

Highlights

Earth Observation: PrimeWater aims to deliver enhanced EO-based water quality products for inland waters, through advanced physics-based algorithms that integrate multi- and hyper-spectral imagery from satellite, airborne and in-situ optical sensors. Primewater will generate added-value products (e.g. turbidity, total suspended matter, chlorophyll-a) that improve freshwater monitoring and increase the situational intelligence of water managers and downstream water services.

Process based modelling: PrimeWater introduces enhanced predictive and early warning capabilities in decision-making for reservoir management, by coupling hydrological and ecological process-based models into an operational platform that generates short- and medium-term forecasts of water flows and quality characteristics in reservoirs. On the same time advanced Data assimilation techniques will be used to improve the skill of hydro-ecological forecasts by integrating EO-based, airborne -based and in-situ observations into the modelling chain.

Data-driven modelling: PrimeWater aspires to transform the abundance of EO-based and in-situ water quality datasets into actionable knowledge for supporting IWRM, through data-driven models. Data-driven models will be used either as standalone algorithms for forecasting of Harmful Algae blooms and eutrophication-related phenomena or as add-ons to physics-based models providing error-correcting capabilities.

Co-development: PrimeWater will establish a complete value chain linking science with the water business sector, following a co-development approach during services’ implementation, through a continuous and efficient interaction and communication with water professionals across the globe. A thorough design of benchmarking activities in 4 regional case studies across, Europe, US and Australia will ensure that the developed products and services respond to the needs of end-users and meet their specific business challenges.

Behavioral analysis: To support understanding on how to overcome individual and institutional barriers in adopting new technologies, PrimeWater employs behavioral approaches and experimental methods for eliciting user preferences, evaluating specific traits of EO-based services and pinpointing the most important factors influencing innovation uptake in the water sector.

Community of Practice: To ensure the sustainability and longevity of the developed services, PrimeWater will establish a CoP to facilitate knowledge exchange and enhance collaboration during the co-design, co-creation and co-evaluation of innovative water services. The CoP will bring together a multispectral audience of water managers, policy makers, knowledge purveyors, and end-users of the water sector together with experts of ICT and space technology, contributing towards the digitization and transformation of the water sector.

Challenge

Our freshwater resources are limited and face increasing pressures from climate variability, pollution, population growth, and competition from many uses. As water management operations are growing in importance and complexity, challenges regarding regulatory compliance, risk management, cost optimization and sustainability of water services foster the need and demand for application of innovative water resources management solutions.

Potential quality threats in freshwater systems are primarily related to eutrophication. Freshwater harmful algae blooms (HAB), resulting from such nutrient overload, can have a broad range of negative impacts on humans, animals and aquatic ecosystems. Many cyanobacteria can produce neurotoxic, hepatotoxic or other bioactive compounds, posing a threat if they occur in drinking water sources. For example, numerous events have prevented the use of prevalent freshwater for drinking in the US due to cyanotoxins breaching the drinking water supply. Adverse ecosystem impacts stemming from high biomass blooms of cyanobacteria and other freshwater HABs, killing fish and bottom dwelling organisms. The death hundreds of thousands of native fish in January 2019 in the Darling River in Australia were a recent reminder of these adverse impacts of deteriorated water quality on aquatic ecosystems.

For water management, adaptive planning is critical for proactively determining and mitigating water hazards since adapting to risks in a planned manner is far more efficient than reacting to a major system failure. At the same time, improved environmental performance is sought while lowering cost. In order to inform complex operational and business decisions, increased situational intelligence extending in space and time is needed. Space technology can be a catalyst to promote and support technology innovation to protect and ensure the sustainability of our water resources by sustaining an environmental information and intelligent services value chain.

Approach

Advances in Earth Observation (EO) can be a catalyst to promote and support technology innovation in Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM), disaster resilience, and monitoring the effectiveness of implemented coping strategies.

In particular for inland waters, EO products and applications range from catchment characterization and evapotranspiration estimation to water quality characteristics of surface water bodies, such as water temperature, chlorophyll-a, total suspended matter, turbidity and dissolved organic matter. While in situ data provide point sample information for the water body status, EO can act complementary by providing surface measurements of large area coverage with a continuously increasing spatial and temporal coverage enabled by the recent developments in the availability of satellite platforms for EOs (including ESA’s Copernicus Programme). Ultimately, these data can yield new insights into the temporal and phenological changes in eutrophication and bloom events, provide early warning of the presence of harmful algal blooms, and characterise the flux and impact of sediment within the catchment.

As space-borne, airborne and in situ optical sensors become increasingly available and appropriate for aquatic ecosystem monitoring and assessment, the science-based applications will need to be further developed to an operational level. PrimeWater is aiming to build this bridge between science and practice, by translating latest innovations in actionable water information services.

Impact

PrimeWater is a Horizon2020 funded research project that generates information on the effects of upstream changes on future water quality and quantity. Building on advanced Earth-Observation data products, integration with additional data sources and diagnostic modelling tools, public and private sector decisions for water resources management are provided with better and actionable information.

The services produced will provide:

· increased situational intelligence

· enhanced predictive and early warning capabilities

· adaptive management of water resources

PrimeWater’s service line will be operationalized and tested in four international show cases for multiple downstream water services and operations.

PrimeWater is designed to impact (a) research in the fields of EOs, and hydrological and ecological modelling, (b) innovation in the water sector and the downstream sector of the European space market, (c) specific societal and environmental challenges, and (d) policy implementation.