Preparation of European Snow, Glacier and Lake/River Ice Services within Copernicus
Nagler, Thomas¹; Bippus, Gabriele¹; Rott, Helmut¹; Schiller, Christian²; Metsämäki, Sari³; Luojus, Kari⁴; Larsen, Hans⁵; Solberg, Rune⁶; Malnes, Eirik⁷; Diamandi, Andrei⁸; Wiesmann, Andreas⁹; Gustafsson, David^10
1ENVEO IT GmbH, AUSTRIA; ²EOX IT Service GmbH, AUSTRIA; ³Finnish Environment Institute, FINLAND; ⁴Finnish Meteorological Institute, AUSTRIA; ⁵Kongsberg Satellite Services AS, NORWAY; ⁶Norwegian Computing Center, NORWAY; ⁷NORUT AS, NORWAY; ⁸Administratia Nationala de Meteorologie R.A., ROMANIA; ⁹GAMMA Remote Sensing AG, SWITZERLAND; ¹⁰Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute, SWEDEN

The project ''CryoLand - GMES Service Snow and Land Ice'' deals with the development and delivery of customized snow, glacier and lake and river ice products for a Downstream Service within the Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES) program of the European Commission. CryoLand exploits Earth Observation data from current optical and microwave sensors and prepares for the upcoming GMES Sentinel satellite family. The project addresses the cryospheric component of GMES Land Monitoring services. The CryoLand project team consists of 10 partner organisations from Austria, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and Romania and is funded by the 7th Framework Program of the European Commission. The CryoLand baseline products for snow include fractional snow extent from optical satellite data, the extent of melting snow from SAR data, and coarse resolution snow water equivalent maps from passive microwave data. Experimental products include maps of snow surface wetness and temperature. The snow products range from large scale coverage at medium resolution to regional products at high resolution addressing a wide user community. The core snow extent product is the homogenized fractional snow extent map covering the Pan-European domain, representing a prototype for a possible EC Snow Service. Regional snow extent products are produced for downstream applications serving local and regional users operating in different domains. Medium resolution optical data (e.g. MODIS, in the near future Sentinel-3) and SAR (ENVISAT ASAR, in the near future Sentinel-1) are the main sources of EO data for generating large scale products. Quality assessment of the snow products has a high priority in the project, e.g. by comparison with snow cover information from high resolution optical sensors, which were made available through the Data warehouse mechanism. Glacier products are based on high resolution optical (SPOT-5, future Sentinel-2) and SAR (TerraSAR-X, future Sentinel-1) data and include glacier outlines, maps of glacier facies, ice velocities and glacier lakes. The glacier products are generated on user demand for test areas in the Alps, Greenland and Himalayan Mountains. Algorithms for lake and river ice products, which include ice extent and its temporal changes and snow extent on ice, are in development, based on optical satellite data and SAR. One major task of CryoLand is the performance assessment of the products, which is carried out in different environments, climate zones and land cover types, defined jointly with users. Accuracy assessment is done in various test areas using in-situ data and partly also very high resolution satellite data. In this presentation processing lines and demonstration products for snow, glacier and lake ice parameters are shown including examples of the product accuracy assessment. An important point of the CryoLand project is the use of advanced information technology, which is applied to process and distribute snow and land ice products in near real time. The concept of the prototype CryoLand Service structure is explained and examples of the Pan-European Snow Extent services which started in March 2012 are shown.