Need for GMES Snow Cover Monitoring

Innsbruck, 04.12.2008
A wide European network of operational meteorological and hydrological entities have expressed their needs for the establishment of a pan-European dynamic snow cover monitoring capability based on satellite observation data. Organizations such as Zentralanstalt für Meteorologie und Geodynamik (ZAMG), and Hydrological Services Division of the Finnish Environment Institute (SYKE) have formally stated their commitment to participate in the development and deployment of the “GMES Downstream Service SnowMOS”.  A corresponding implementation proposal was submitted to the European Commission’ Space Programme on Dec 4, 2008. The SnowMoS initiative is coordinated by Prof. Helmut Rott, and his Innsbruck based ENVEO expert team.

The interoperability and network services integration has been put under the responsibility of EOX. An INSPIRE and GEOSS compliant implementation is foreseen. Through a service oriented architecture internal workflows will be managed and input data services will be interfaced (GMES Land Monitoring Core Services, satellite data services, etc. ). Open standards based connections will be provided with end-user decision support environments.

EC co-funding decisions are expected by mid 2009. Stepwise roll-outs of service functions are planned between 2010 to 2014 and will include exploitation of data expected from GMES Sentinel satellites.

Download SnowMoS brochure