Funded as part of the Italian National Recovery and Resilience Plan (Piano Nazionale Ripresa e Resilienza, PNRR), IRIDEInternational Report for Innovative Defence of Earth) is a project dedicated to the realization of an End-to-End System to provide the services on a geospatial basis at the national and European level, according to the needs expressed by the Italian national authorities with the aim of providing services to the public administration and private customers.
How does the project work?
IRIDE is part of the PNRR’s second component of the first mission (M1C2), specifically in the M1C2.4.2 “Earth Observation” investment. The development of the IRIDE system is entrusted to ESA, with support from the Italian Space Agency (ASI). It represents one of Europe’s most important Earth Observation space programs and involves the development of a constellation of small and medium-sized satellites to provide monitoring services in different areas (for water resources, air quality, in the marine and coastal area, on ground movement and land cover, weather conditions, critical infrastructure), emergency management and security, and to provide analytical data for the development of commercial applications by startups, small and medium-sized enterprises and industry.
The project has a duration of three years (April 2023 – June 2026).
What does CIMA Research Foundation do?
CIMA Research Foundation participates in two different Lots of the project. Within Lot 1, led by Planetek, we contribute to Service S6 Water Management, coordinating the work package dedicated to hydrological, hydraulic and sediment transport modeling. In particular, we will be responsible for:
- the assimilation into the Flood-PROOFS national-scale operational hydrologic modeling of satellite maps of soil moisture and snow cover area, made in the project, also taking advantage of the new IRIDE data, so as to allow the assimilation of additional satellite products into hydrologic modeling
- the coupling of the operational national-scale hydrologic modeling Flood-PROOFS with the CASCADE model, which estimates the sediment budget for each branch, realized by the project partner University of Padua
- the operational implementation of the Snow Water Equivalent anomaly index, which represents a new anomaly index at the national scale
- using as input to Flood-PROOFS the products produced in the S5 Hydrometeoclimate service (short-term weather forecasts, seasonal-scale weather projections, climate projections)
Within Lot 1, CIMA Research Foundation also contributes to the work package dedicated to water resource management and drought and water scarcity monitoring with
- Operational realization at the Italian scale of the CDI (Combined Drougth Indicator), SPEI (Standardized Precipitation Evaporation Index), Soil-Moisture-Anomaly indices by integrating satellite, high-resolution and near real time information
- • Operational realization of fAPAR (fraction of Absorbed Photosynthetically Active Radiation) index from Sentinel 2, useful for monitoring vegetation status
- • Operational realization of the Anomaly of fAPAR
- Improvement of the NDVI index, which describes the health status of vegetation, currently operational using data from the IRIDE constellation, also useful for fire prediction
Within Lot 4, led by eGEOS, CIMA Research Foundation is both pilot user and subcontractor and will contribute to the development of four processing chains for Rapid Damage Mapping: a pair referring to flood risk and a pair referring to wildfires risk. Both pairs are intended to generate a Delineation Map (for identifying the area affected by the flood or fire) and a Grading Map (for classifying the degree of damage caused by the flood or wildfires).
For flood risk, we are involved in the technical development of the two chains, while for wildfires risk, we are also responsible for the development, implementation and management of the corresponding chains.
From a technical point of view, in Phase 1 (i.e., the so-called precursor phase), CIMA Research Foundation will be in charge of improving the current models developed for the Italian Department of Civil Protection for mapping flooded and wildfires-prone areas using data from Copernicus Sentinel 1 and Sentinel 2 satellite constellations (the AUTOWADE and AUTOBAM models, respectively). In Phase 2, it will be our task to improve the four chains by integrating the above models, in which the future data acquired by the IRIDE constellation (of constellations) will be used operationally.
