PrimeWater – Horizon 2020 project

Project Outline

PrimeWater is a collaboration between 9 international agencies and is funded through an HORIZON 2020 project, the DT-SPACE-06-EO-2019: International Cooperation Copernicus – Designing Earth Observation (EO) downstream applications with international partners. Janet Anstee is leading the Australian activities of PrimeWater with a team of researchers from CSIRO Oceans and Atmosphere, CSIRO Land and Water and Melbourne Water.

PrimeWater aims to maximise the potential of the EO technologies for the water sector by enhancing and expanding the information base for inland water quality attributes, through advanced physics-based algorithms that integrate multi- and hyper-spectral imagery from satellite, airborne and ground-based sensors, increasing the situational intelligence of water regulators, emergency planners, water-related industry professionals and local communities (1^st strategic objective).

PrimeWater aspires to further add value to EO data and other Copernicus sectoral services through cross-cutting research with Data Assimilation (DA) and Machine Learning (ML) techniques aiming at improving the skill of hydro-ecological forecasts and their related impact at different spatial scales and time horizons, and hence improve preparedness against water hazards and enhance the capacity of decision-making through uncertainty information (2^nd strategic objective).

PrimeWater will establish a complete value chain linking science with the water business sector, ensuring the co-development of products and services through continuous and efficient interaction and communication with water professionals across the globe and in-depth analysis of the intrinsic barriers for the wide market uptake of EO-enabled services in the water sector. As a result PrimeWater will deliver water intelligent services that capitalise on advanced EO data products and intersections with other data sources, will build on cause-effect analyses through diagnostic modelling tools, and will utilise predictive and prescriptive calculations by integrating forecasting capabilities with planning and scenario analysis (3^rd strategic objective).