2 nd International Conference Citizen Observatories for natural hazards and Water Management Venice, 27-30 November 201 8 EARTH OBSERVATION AND SOCIAL MULTIMEDIA DATA FUSION FOR NATURAL HAZARDS AND WATER MANAGEMENT: THE H2020 EOPEN PROJECT PARADIGM Gialampoukidis I. 1 , A. Moumtzidou 1 , M. G. Scarpino 2 , G. Palumbo 2 , S. Vrochidis 1 , I. Kompatsiaris 1 , F. Zaffanella 3 , D. Norbiato 3 , M. Ferri 3 , & G.Vingione 2 1 Information Technologies Institute, Centre for Research and Technology Hellas, Thessaloniki, Greece – e-mail: heliasgj@iti.gr, moumtzid@iti.gr, stefanos@iti.gr, ikom@iti.gr 2 Serco S.p.A., Rome, Italy – e-mail: Gabriella.Scarpino@serco.com, Giovanna.Palumbo@serco.com, Guido.Vingione@serco.com 3 Autorità di Bacino Distrettuale delle Alpi Orientali, Venice, Italy – e-mail: francesco.zaffanella@adbve.it, daniele.norbiato@adbve.it, michele.ferri@adbve.it KEY POINTS  Flood detection using satellite data  Data fusion and integration of non-EO data technologies within the H2020-EOPEN project  Future directions in Emergency Management and Early Warning Services that combine EO with non-EO data 1 INTRODUCTION Since the adoption of the 2006/60/EU Directive by part of the European Commission the concept of water management has changed; moreover following the adoption of the directive 2007/60/EU about flood risk assessment, water management has become relevant not only in sectors like agriculture, tourism and water safety, but also for the security of citizens. Hazardous flood preparedness and recovery is one aspect of water management which addresses various issues ranging from irrigated agriculture to leisure activities - the contribution of Earth Observation (EO) data in such contexts has been elucidated in the past decades and is at the basis of some current Copernicus Services targeting water governance. Several H2020 projects develop decision support systems for disaster resilience using social media, weather data and Copernicus 1 data, with a particular focus on flood events and water management. For example, H2020-beAWARE 2 proposes an integrated solution to support forecasting, early warnings, transmission and routing of the emergency data, aggregated analysis of multimodal data and management of the coordination between the first responders and the authorities. Moreover, I-REACT 3 is an innovation project funded by the European Commission. The project aims to integrate emergency management data coming from multiple sources, including that provided by citizens through social media and crowdsourcing to effectively prevent and/or react against natural disasters. The H2020-EOPEN 4 (opEn interOperable Platform for unified access and analysis of Earth observatioN data) project focuses on three use-cases – two of them, namely, “Flood risk assessment and prevention” and “Food security”, involve water management. The EOPEN project has already been communicated in ESA BiDS17 (Vingione et al. 2017) and in ESA MWBS2018 5 , exchanging ideas and knowledge by its interaction with other H2020-EO-2-2017 projects and similar ESA initiatives. Recently, the user requirements meeting in Vicenza, Veneto area, Italy has already identified many user requirements to be taken into account in the development of the EOPEN platform. The MOSES 6 (Managing crOp water Saving with Enterprise Services) project output is a Platform, based on a variety of technologies and data sources, including EO data, aimed mainly to support irrigation water managers for water procurement, delivery and distribution; moreover, normally irrigation consortia managers face also the management of water outflow on the occurrence of floods. Both, the EOPEN and the 1 The Copernicus program Copernicus is the European Earth Observation and Monitoring Programme, previously known as GMES (Global Monitoring for Environment and Security) - http://www.copernicus.eu/ 2 http://beaware-project.eu/ 3 http://www.i-react.eu/ 4 http://eopen-project.eu/ 5 http://mwbs2018.esa.int/ 6 http://www.moses-project.eu/