WaCoDiS: Automated Earth Observation data processing within an event-driven architecture for water monitoring

Abstract Climate changes and the ongoing intensification of agriculture effect in increased material inputs in watercourses and dams. To ensure an efficient and environmentally friendly water resource management, water management associations need means for efficient water monitoring as well as novel strategies to reduce the pollution of surface and ground water. Traditionally, water management associations operate large sensor networks to suffice their needs for hydrological and meteorological measurement data to monitor and model physical processes within the catchments they are responsible for. Implementing a comprehensive monitoring system often suffers from sparse coverage of in-situ data. Due to the evolvement of the Copernicus satellite platforms, the broader availability of satellite data provides a great potential for deriving valuable, complementary information from Earth Observation data, that contributes to a detailed understanding of hydrological processes. Although the number of satellite data platforms that provide online processing environments is growing, it is still a big challenge to integrate those platforms into traditional workflows of users from environmental domains such as hydrology. Thus, in this paper, we introduce a software architecture to facilitate the generation of Earth Observation information targeted towards hydrology. The presented WaCoDiS System comprises several microservices as well standardized interfaces that enable a platform-independent processing of satellite data. First, we discuss the contribution of Earth Observation data to water monitoring and derive several challenges regarding the facilitation of satellite data processing. We then describe our system design with a brief overview about the different system components which form an automated processing pipeline. The suitability of our system is proven as part of a pre-operational deployment for a German water management association. In addition, we demonstrate how our system is capable of integrating satellite data platforms, using the Copernicus Data and Exploitation Platform - Deutschland (CODE-DE) as a reference example.