D7-7 InterRisk Final Scientific Report

The lack of a pan-European infrastructure for uniform access and distribution of environmental data is a severe limitation in all types of risk and crisis management. In marine and coastal areas, environmental risk and crisis situations such as oil spills and harmful algal blooms usually have a transboundary and an international dimension. Thus, users in several countries and organizations need access to the same data, including observations, derived parameters and predictions of future conditions The InterRisk project therefore developed a pilot system for interoperable GMES monitoring and forecasting services for environmental risk management in marine and coastal areas. The InterRisk pilot is comprised of an open system architecture based on noted GIS and web standards, and integrates services for several European regional seas, including Norwegian, UK and Irish, French, German and Polish, and Italian waters. These services include basic services, such as delivery of satellite data products, in situ measurements, and met-ocean model forecasts as well as metadata catalogues facilitating product discovery. These services also include complex services such as detection of oil spills in satellite radar imagery, oil drift predictions for confirmed spills, and identification of ocean areas of high chlorophyll-a concentrations. All service and system development are based on standards from W3C (World Wide Web Consortium), OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards), OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc.) and ISO (International Organization for Standardization), in line with INSPIRE (INfrastructure for SPatial InfoRmation in Europe) recommendations.NERSC Technical Report no. 309. Funded by the European Commission contract no. 03525