FRESHMON · High Resolution Freshwater Monitoring: FreshMonGMES Downstream Services

In-land aquatic systems are under significant pressure from agriculture, economical development and climate change. EU water policy consists of several European directives; most important the Water Framework Directive (WFD) to sustain aquatic ecosystems. Monitoring programmes have been defined that require a coherent and comprehensive overview about the water status within each river basin and lake district, i.e. continuous and frequent high resolution water quality map products are required. Earth Observation (EO) products improve the capability for harmonized monitoring of water constituents at catchment scale, indicating impacts on water quality and changes within the aquatic ecosystem directly.The FRESHMON consortium will develop a new service-line for the frequent provision of Earth Observation based products for water quality monitoring, combining in situ and hydrodynamic modelling components and integrating the information in a GIS,. The users targeted by FRESHMON are international, national and state-wide authorities, who have a mandate for coordinating the implementation of the WFD. Additional users are national and international private entities, who are dealing with water quality and related issues. By providing high-resolution spatial geo-information on water quality parameters a wide group of user needs is addressed, that cannot be satisfied by existing GMES Core services. The main objective is to create continuous and well accepted downstream services for inland water monitoring at European level, through:* methodological research in improving and harmonizing different EO-based methodologies for retrieving water constituents and water depth* establishment of validation and quality management standards with end users* providing customization, confidence and acceptance of EO products for end users* establishment of a European business network of Downstream inland water service providers and end-users