The coast is where land meets the sea or the ocean, and coastal waters form a natural boundary that is dynamic and changes due to various hydromorphological, climate- and weather-driven, and human-related processes. Depending on their location around the world, coastal waters can be affected and transformed by tides, waves, currents, storm surges, sediment transport and sea level rise, some of which can cause coastal flooding and erosion. Coastal defense engineering and shoreline management are often used to mediate these effects. The EU H2020 Coastal Waters Research Synergy Framework (Co-ReSyF) has delivered a platform to support and monitor economic and social coastal activities (e.g. fisheries, harbor operations, ship traffic monitoring, oil spill detection) in this changing world.
Until recently, scientists had to deal with the daunting task of mining large datasets for suitable data, and often downloading EO information from various different sources. In addition, as the datasets increased in volume, the processing has become slower and demanding of better computing facilities.The EU H2020 Coastal Waters Research Synergy Framework (Co-ReSyF) project tackled these issues, by developing a platform for data access, processing, visualization in one place. The platform is based on cloud computing to maximize processing effort and task orchestration. Co-ReSyF addressed the issues faced by inexperienced EO researchers, and also targets EO experts and downstream users, with main focus on enabling EO data access and processing for coastal and marine applications. In a collaborative research environment, the Co-ReSyF platform revolutionized the accessibility to Big EO Data, and help to create a new era of EO data processing and exploitation.
Co-ReSyF facilitates access to Earth Observation (EO) data and various processing tools for the coastal and oceanic research community, towards the provision of services based on EO data namely (but not restricted to) Coastal Water research. This was achieved by:
-Setting up a collaborative environment which facilitates the integration of EO data use into multi-disciplinary research activities, by guiding researchers towards easy to use and understand data analysis tools, designed to extract the information held within EO data
-Reaching out to a wide community of coastal and oceanic researchers who validated, tested, and suggested improvements to the framework, whilst using it to integrate EO data use into their research, based on new Sentinel-series satellites
-Providing a powerful framework with scalable capabilities and integrated tools for dedicated EO data access, processing, and process automation
-Creating a Knowledge base for the future users
Co-ReSyF created a cloud platform, which simplifies integration of EO data use into multi-disciplinary research activities. This platform is user friendly and accessible to inexperienced scientists as well as EO and coastal experts. A set of coastal Research Applications has been implemented within the Co-ReSyF platform during the project for open source use.The applications include the following:
-Bathymetry Determination from SAR Images
-Determination of bathymetry, benthic habitat classification and water quality from optical sensors
-Vessel and oil spill detection
-Time-series processing for hyper-temporal optical data analysis
-Ocean Coastal Altimetry
