Copernicus has become a very successful programme and it is the leading global programme on Earth Observation comprising a space component and a number of closely related value-added services. Its data and information products have become the basis of numerous applications in Europe and beyond.
All Copernicus services are already operational and have been enabled by the earth observation data from the first seven Copernicus Sentinel satellites, as well as a number of contributing missions from other public and private operators. More satellites will be launched by 2021.
Copernicus data and information products are being used by thousands of users in the public sector, the research and scientific community, SMEs and start-ups to create satellite-enabled products and services, providing new opportunities for business thanks to the free, full and open data access provided by the European Union. These businesses are creating highly qualified jobs in Europe.
The next Multi-annual Financial Framework of the European Union is under preparation and Copernicus is one component of the proposed EU Space Programme. Over 2021-2027 Copernicus is expected to evolve these existing services to meet emerging user and policy needs, and introduce corresponding new satellite capacities. These new and emerging needs are framed in the ‘Space Strategy for Europe’ adopted end of 2016:
1. climate change and sustainable development;
2. to monitor CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions,
3. changes in the Arctic
4. land use, agriculture and forestry,
5. evolving challenges related to border controls and maritime surveillance
The Commission undertook a significant number of studies and we extensively consulted with our partners to derive the specific observation needs, to understand what other European, national or international public or private stakeholders are planning to do. Six High-priority candidate missions have been identified to fill future observation gaps.
The most urgent gap when addressing the new needs identified before in the Space Strategy is indeed the imaging of atmospheric CO2 concentrations with a sufficient temporal and spatial resolution allowing the identification of anthropogenic CO2 emissions to support the stock-taking under the Paris Climate Agreement.
This is tackling a global challenge at the international level and presents our top priority, which in addition needs to be implemented with urgency in order to contribute to the 2028 stocktaking exercise.
Further, there are a number of candidate missions responding to potential observation gaps, which have not yet been assigned a priority amongst them:
o Passive Microwave Radiometer Mission;
o High-resolution Land Surface Temperature Mission ;
o Polar Ice and Snow Topography Mission;
o L-Band- SAR Imaging Mission;
o Hyperspectral Imaging Mission;
The exact number of additional satellites and the related timelines will depend amongst other factors on the budget eventually allocated to the Space Programme and Copernicus within the next MFF, as well as on the complementary subscriptions by ESA Member States to the Copernicus Space Component at their 2019 and subsequent Ministerial Councils.
In any case, these new sensors will multiply further the volume of data systematically produced 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and 365 days each year. We will need to keep up with the capacity of our delivery mechanisms to our users, which means that the Data and Information Access Services, the “DIASs”, will have to expand and grow, possibly into cloud environments, to keep pace with all these data expected ten years from now.

This presentation will give an overview of the current status and future perspectives of the Copernicus space component.

The European Union (EU) led Copernicus programme is the world’s largest civil Earth Observation (EO) programme and the biggest EO data supplier. It monitors Earth more accurate than ever before, and aims to give decision-makers across Europe useful information to act on, both at EU level and on a regional basis.

The Copernicus space component, coordinated by the European Space Agency (ESA), is composed of six families of dedicated satellites (the Sentinels) which work together to feed-back huge amounts of data on everything from land movement to ocean patterns, pollution to ice coverage, etc.
With seven high-performance Sentinel satellites already in orbit and 13 other spacecraft/instruments still to be launched and more than 185.000 registered Sentinel data users on the ESA/EU Copernicus data portal, as well as numerous sophisticated operational services, the system has evolved at a breath-taking pace.

Access to data from these satellites and from the contributing missions is ensured through an integrated Ground Segment. Additional, the cloud-based platforms called the Data and Information Access Services (DIASs), deployed in June 2018, provide centralized access to Copernicus data and information, as well as to processing tools.
All these data, along with measurements taken from Earth are used to fuel six thematic information services in the main environmental domains: marine, atmosphere, land, emergency, climate change and civil security.

The future evolution of the space component has already started with a large set of concrete needs and requirements gathered over the last 2 years. User and observation requirements have been identified, structured and prioritized in a continuous reflection process led by the European Commission (EC), and with the main support of ESA and other partners.
Two sets of requirements have emerged from different EC consultations and workshops, leading to the main elements of the future Space Component architecture:
• High Priority Candidate missions: enlargement of the present measurements through the introduction of new missions to answer emerging and urgent user requirements and EU policy needs. These new observations would include, among others, CO2 measurements to estimate anthropogenic emissions, high-resolution thermal observations, monitoring of sea ice and ice sheets in the polar region, hyper-spectral measurements and SAR L-band observations
• Next Generation missions: improvement of the current measurement capabilities, mostly by means of the newest generation of technology and instruments compared to the ones currently deployed. They will ensure stability and continuity, while increasing the quantity and quality of products and services.

With the launch of Jason-3 in January 2016, followed by Sentinel-3A in February 2016 and recently Sentinel-3B in April 2018, EUMETSAT has been very active in providing highly reliable operational and user services to the Copernicus services and other Copernicus users focusing on marine application and this complementing the distribution of selected third party mission data such as Suomi NPP-1 and GOES-R. The launch of Jason-CS/Sentinel-6 in fall 2020 will provide the continuity of the reference altimetry mission of utmost importance for the science community. With the launch of EUMETSAT’s third generation of Meteosat and of the second generation of EUMETSAT’s Polar System satellites embarking respectively the Sentinel-4 & -5 payloads, EUMETSAT will bring the Sentinel missions one major step forward by providing important services to the atmosphere service and user communities. Copernicus and its climate change service also benefits from the word-wide recognized expertise of EUMETSAT and its immense contribution. Better access to the data remains a priority and the implementation and operations of EUMETSAT’s WekEO as a Data Interface Access service (DIAS) is ramping-up at pace. Looking forward to the future Sentinel missions such as the carbon and the passive microwave radiometer missions, EUMETSAT expects to bring its intense operational and scientific knowledge and outstanding user service dedication to serve the needs of the users.

By 2019, the Copernicus programme has reached a remarkable level of maturity with its space, service and in-situ components fully active and delivering. With the Copernicus Sentinel satellites now in operations, and together with the Copernicus Contributing Missions, the space component is the main source of input data for the other Copernicus components as well as for vast and diverse user communities.

The presentation will give an overview of the Copernicus Sentinel missions currently composed of 7 satellites in operations, i.e. Sentinel-1A & B, Sentinel-2A & B, Sentinel-5 Precursor operated by ESA and Sentinel-3A & B operated jointly by Eumetsat and ESA.

Within this overview will be addressed all the elements of the Sentinel missions in operations, i.e. the status of the various satellites and their on-board sensors, the status of the Sentinel products release including their calibration and validation, and the status on the data flow and data access.

The presentation will also provide for each Sentinel mission their major highlights so far in terms of operational applications and briefly addresses the advances in Earth Sciences that those missions have triggered.

The user requirements for any Earth Observation mission in operations are constantly evolving. In the case of Sentinel missions, the Copernicus service component is the prime source of requirements. The presentation will therefore describe the envisaged near term evolution for the Sentinel missions in operations aiming at the same time to answer to those dynamic requirements and to benefit from the latest progress with information technology.

Copernicus is a unique worldwide achievement: seven Sentinels are operational and their performance, coupled with the long-term continuity guaranteed by the replacement satellites under construction (the so-called Sentinels C and D) allows to focus Europe’s immediate efforts towards the expansion of the system’s capabilities. These will be responding to the following emerging needs:
1. climate change and sustainable development;
2. to monitor CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions,
3. changes in the Arctic
4. land use, agriculture and forestry,
5. evolving challenges related to border controls and maritime surveillance
Based on the above listed users’ and services’ needs the following missions have been preliminary defined:
o Anthropogenic CO2 Monitoring Missions (CO2M);
o High-resolution Land Surface Temperature Mission (LSTM);
o Hyperspectral Imaging Mission (CHIME);
o Polar Ice and Snow Topography Mission (PICE/CRISTAL);
o Passive Microwave Radiometer Mission (CIMR);
o L-Band SAR Imaging Mission (ROSE-L);

The Copernicus Anthropogenic CO2 Monitoring (CO2M) mission aims to establish the space component of a CO2 monitoring and verification support capacity able to estimate the man-made CO2 emissions and overall CO2 budget at country and regional/megacity scales and to allow evaluating the implementation and effectiveness of the CO2 emission reduction strategies proposed in the Paris Agreement. This system requires the capability to provide accurate and consistent quantification of anthropogenic CO2 emission and their trends supported by satellite observations.
The Copernicus Land Surface Temperature Monitoring (LSTM) Mission will be able to complement the current visible (VIS) and near-infrared (NIR) Copernicus observations with high spatio-temporal resolution Thermal Infrared observations over land and coastal regions in support of agriculture management services and a range of additional services.
The Copernicus HyperSpectral Imaging Mission for the Environment (CHIME) mission aims at augmenting the Copernicus space component with precise spectroscopic measurements to derive quantitative surface characteristics supporting the monitoring, implementation and improvement of a range of policies in the domain of raw materials, agriculture, soils, food security, biodiversity, environmental degradation and hazards, inland and coastal waters, snow, forestry and the urban environment.
The Copernicus polaR Ice and Snow Topographic Altimeter (CRISTAL) mission will provide enhanced retrieval of land ice sheet/glacier elevation, sea ice thickness and freeboard and ocean surface elevation, wave-height and wind speed by measurements implementing higher spatial resolution. This will allow monitoring critical climate signals: ice sheet, ice cap melting and sea level, as well as to monitor variability of Arctic and Southern Ocean sea-ice and its snow loading. It will also support applications related to coastal and inland waters and contribute to the observation of ocean topography.
The Copernicus Imaging Microwave Radiometer (CIMR) mission will uniquely observe a wide range of parameters, in particular sea ice concentration, and serve operational systems at almost all-weather conditions, day and night. This mission shall provide improved continuity of sea-ice concentration monitoring missions, in particular in terms of spatial resolution, temporal resolution and accuracy (specially near the ice edges) and Sea Surface Temperature (SST).
The Copernicus Radar Observing System for Europe L-band (ROSE-L) mission target applications are: crop maps and type discrimination, forest type and cover (in support to biomass estimation), vegetation, soil moisture, food security, precision farming and maritime surveillance. This mission will contribute to the operational monitoring of the cryosphere and polar regions including automatic sea ice mapping and land ice monitoring and responds to Emergency Management services covering both natural and anthropogenic hazards. Other emerging applications will be made possible by the synergetic and complementary observations with C-band and X-band SAR systems.

The Copernicus Contributing Missions (CCMs) are providing EO data that are complementary to the Sentinel missions. The CCMs are therefore an essential additional source of data to Copernicus Services and users. They include mostly EO commercial missions (i.e. very high resolution optical or SAR missions) but also other EO data provided free of charge (e.g. European CryoSat, US Landsat, etc.).

The data availability is guaranteed by the Copernicus “Data Warehouse” (DWH) coordinated by ESA. The DWH ensures that the most suitable datasets are provided to the Copernicus Services in response to specific time and quality requirements. Currently the DWH offers more than 500 datasets from 27 CCMs and serves 1700 registered users. The DWH provides two sets of data: a) systematic coverages and acquisitions with predefined characteristics primarily for the Copernicus Land, Marine and Atmosphere Monitoring Services, and b) on-demand data acquired mostly in rush mode over areas affected by natural and man-made disasters or by a crisis, primarily for the Copernicus Emergency Management and Security Services.

The actual DWH infrastructures and support functions achieving this complex orchestration are implemented through the Copernicus Space Component (CSC) Coordinated Data Access System (CDS). The CDS provides comprehensive and harmonised access to the CCMs data and the necessary functions such as the Emergency Satellite Tasking (REACT) service, the Help desk, the Order desk and the Data Quality services.

Today, both the EO data offer and the Copernicus user needs are rapidly changing and the DWH has to evolve accordingly. The emergence of NewSpace sensors from small-sat constellations is deeply transforming the data supply and as such they have to be rapidly assessed and eventually integrated into the DWH. Furthermore, the availability of digital tools such as exploitation platforms and cloud-based services is placing the DWH in front of new challenges towards a smarter and more user centric data access and data analytics systems.

This presentation also introduces the evolution of the DWH and the relation with the Copernicus Contributing Missions and the concept of the “multi-scheme data supply” with fit-for-purpose data licences in a dynamic set-up with CCMs. In the longer term, it may also be possible to incorporate new procurement approaches such as PPP agreements and related contracts.

Copernicus Sentinels data bring substantial benefits to the economy, the environment and society. But…how many, precisely? If it is true that “we cannot demonstrate what we cannot measure”, the need is concrete to quantify these benefits. After 5 years from the start of Copernicus operations, what concrete figures can we expose to quantify these benefits? What evidence can we provide? What tools have we developed and how appropriate are these? How confident can we be that we will be able to discern progress along time and to quantify it? The proposed presentation will try to answer to these questions by providing some examples and concrete figures collected so far, together with a reflection about their significance and possible perspectives about information that would still be needed.