Access to local, country-wide or global status information and trends of water quality in inland surface waters is essential for high-level water-resource-management of governmental bodies, but also for many concrete and actual water related issues such as sedimentation in dams or cyanobacteria blooms in bathing lakes. Information on e.g. sediments in the water column, algae and eutrophication can support efficient planning on localized comprehensive measurements, environmental impact or directive monitoring, and serve as proxy for Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) defined by the UN. In principle, relevant water quality information parameters can be derived extremely cost-efficient and with a minimum logistical effort for millions of water bodies, using measurements from satellite based earth observation (EO) sensors. For a broader user acceptance, general demands such as the provision of reliable consistent and independent information, and an easy, used adapted information access is required, beyond further user specific adaptations. State-of-the-art processing technologies in conjunction with a very user friendly ccess through web applications support this demand efficiently within the eoFRESH business concept:
eoFRESH addresses the information demand of water industries (dam, aquaculture and water treatment operators) and development banks. It supports state and regional water agencies with their monitoring obligations. Also, water tourism might later be addressed through online algae bloom alerts for bathing tourism and turbidity for divers, accessible within common platforms such as the weather portals.
eoFRESH provides a number of relevant water quality measures and satellite based monitoring services to the addressed client groups. The common demand of those client groups are reliable, independent and consistent water quality information products of water bodies of all scales (lakes, reservoirs, rivers, ..) globally. Both, actual and also historic information back for decades in time for environmental baseline analysisxc are increasingly required, as water evolved to the most relevant global resource of the 21th century. eoFRESH intends to fulfil this demand with cost-effective high-quality products and services, with global harmonized products as backbone, and mechanisms for an easy adaptation to dedicated user demands on all spatial and temporal scales globally.
