EEA Spatial Data Themes
The objective of this service is to assist the European Environment Agency (EEA) in the implementation of cross-cutting activities for the coordination of Copernicus Programme in-situ components.
The service's description
The activities we perform are aimed at:
Stabilisation
Establishing and maintaining an overview of the status of in-situ data for Copernicus services
Improvement
Improving conditions for access and use of in-situ data for Copernicus services
What are in-situ data?
Copernicus services do not rely entirely on data from satellites, but also use data collected from in-situ monitoring networks (e.g. ground-based weather stations, ocean buoys and air quality monitoring networks) to provide robust integrated information and to calibrate and validate satellite data. In-situ data are an essential and integrated part of Copernicus, and are used extensively on a daily basis by Copernicus services and the space component to build products and provide services required by end users. They are also used to calibrate and validate satellite missions.
There are a multitude of ‘in-situ’ data owned by individual national and/or regional agencies, which are still far from being fully standardized with each other to allow for an effective systematic use within Copernicus services, through a pan-European dataset. Our role is to carry out periodic reconnaissance with the individual agencies in order to understand the state of the art in view of the set objectives.