EO4NOWCAST – Earth Observation for Severe Weather Hazard Nowcasting

Q: What was your motivation for creating this proposal?

A: The number of people and assets exposed to severe weather events is increasing due to climate change and urbanisation. Disaster risk managers need to enhance the efficiency and prediction capabilities of warning information services since available Decision Support Systems, generally based on national and regional weather forecasting, are not trusted in small sized and urbanised basins.

Q: Which is the most critical impact (societal or other) that your project could make (if you could name one) ?

A: In case of severe weather conditions, EO4NOWACST supports the improvement of the emergency management process by anticipating information on the localisation and probability of occurrence of flash floods with a replicable approach that exploits the synergy between EOs, ground-based measurements and machine learning. Moreover, the near real-time soil moisture maps provided by EO4NOWCAST may be beneficial for the agriculture and water resource management sectors.

Q: Considering the recent funding received through the AI4Copernicus Open Calls, do you have any plans for further development of your idea?

A: Thanks to AI4Copernicus, the soil moisture mapping and flood risk nowcasting services will be developed and demonstrated in the relevant Mediterranean use case of the Polcevera river (Genoa, Italy) where Artys already provides monitoring solutions to local authorities. Further developments regard the testing in territories with different pluvial and morphological characteristics for generalisation.