Planetek Hellas leads consortium for the first Pre-Commercial Procurement in Europe on Earth Observation.

Planetek Hellas, acting as the prime in the submitting company grouping, together with Planetek Italia, CMCC, KSAT and Creotech Instruments, has been awarded the MARINE-EO PCP Phase 2 project for the design, development, testing and demonstration of the Lot 1, titled: SATOCEAN - Copernicus Marine Environment Monitoring and Climate Change.

The consortium led by Planetek Hellas started the Phase 1 of the PCP (Design) on July 2018 and in October 2018 was evaluated with the highest ranking, among the three consortiums that continued in Phase 2 (Prototype).

MARINE–EO is “the first Earth observation pre-commercial procurement in Europe, cofounded by the H2020 program” aiming at procuring the development of demand-driven EO-based services, adopted on open standards, bringing incremental or radical innovations in the field of maritime awareness and leveraging on the existing Copernicus Services and other products from the Copernicus portfolio.

The Marine Environment Monitoring is a complex cross cutting area where Earth Observation (EO) satellites and more specifically, Copernicus Sentinel’s provide major contribution. This complexity and diverse topics that need to be monitored and explored can be summarized in the following three use cases:

1. Marine Environmental Status in Hot Spots;
2. Fish Farms: Detection of Fish Farm Threats;
3. Detection of Vessels and Icebergs in the Arctic zone.

MARINE-EO PCP > SATOCEAN - End-of-project presentation

Demonstration video of the solutions developed by Planetek Consortium

The three use cases are the integral part of the SATOCEAN (Lot 1) activity developed by Planetek Hellas consortium and will be designed and realized by exploiting the competences and expertise of the consortium to provide the services, Planetek for the WQ and aquaculture services (Rheticus Marine) and KSAT for the vessels and iceberg identification and routes. All the services will be implemented through a complex and advanced system based on Creotech’s Data and Information Access Services (DIAS) platform.

The first two use cases refer to the monitoring hot spots in coastal marine environment. The third use case refers to the maritime safety with regards to ice shipping route, vessel detection and iceberg monitoring.

Coastal and Marine Environment contributes to water quality monitoring and to environmental risk assessment. Specifically, Copernicus Marine Environment Monitoring Service (CMEMS) provides long time-series of in-situ (physical and biochemical) and remote sensing (ocean colour and SST) products and data that feed coastal areas with important information. This information is vital for monitoring the status of coastal areas, adhering to the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD), and other related products. Using CMEMS data, Copernicus Sentinel imagery, available in-situ measurements and specialized hydro-physical models, the consortium will:

• Provide a wide set of EO based products from Copernicus under free and open license and data obtained from other freely available satellite missions in order to obtain relevant parameters on the quality of sea areas of interest. In this context, the use of advanced modelling will improve spatial resolution reaching values less than 1km x 1km. (First and second case histories)
• Provide innovative monitoring information and routing services to support involved authorities as well as ships navigators on board the ship and private industries in their activities of monitoring, navigation in or near ice and ice defence in the Arctic zone. (Third case history)
• Develop innovative interfaces aiming in making easy and immediate the access to the relevant information to the different users communities interested by the information services provided. (all case histories)