Foster User Uptake of Copernicus Earth Observation Solar Services – Photosynthetically Active Radiation Data for Agriculture, Horticulture, and other Applications

The main objective of this action is to promote the exploitation of the Copernicus solar radiation products to derive several downstream services to supply Photosynthetically Active Radiation (PAR) values to meet the needs of the numerous requests received every year.

The purpose of this action is to go beyond the delivery of the most adequate innovative services, but also to generate other opportunities for businesses by stimulating SMEs and start-ups in providing sustainable value-added services for their own panel of users, in Europe as well as outside Europe.

All developments will rely on an existing benchmarking architecture that compares several methods to derive PAR from satellite imagery. Their performance is already assessed at four locations in the world. Agreements must be already established with institutes providing in-situ PAR measurements to ease the extension of the validation activity. Collaborations with satellite-derived PAR dataset providers must also be set up to ensure the most objective analysis of the performance of the developed methods.

The idea of this action is to get the best of this successful project and replicate the action to other geographical areas and to other applications to maximize the adoption of these Copernicus downstream services by community. The strategic role of the coordinator between stakeholders, intermediate users and end-users provides a constructive environment to maximize synergies and to reach this challenging objective, by:

• the systematization of the validation campaigns to other geographical areas and for other applications
• adapting the pilots to fulfil the requirements of other communities of users
• the promotion, advertisement, dissemination of the services

CNES will rely on key and well identified intermediate users, capable to immediately reach a wide number of end users. Weatherquest is for instance one of the numerous intermediate users of the Copernicus solar products. This SME provides a downstream service to more than sixty farmers in UK for the management of soft fruit crops in tunnels. High quality archives and real-time calibrated PAR time series and maps would foster an enhanced monitoring of the crops in the tunnels and would consequently maximize farmers’ profits by controlling the fruit harvest period. The objective is to promote the fruitful example of the PAR data supply to this company to the wine and to the berry community via the participation to several events and exhibitions.