Copernicus collaborative ground segment to support maritime situational awareness

Abstract

Copernicus (former GMES, Global Monitoring of Environment and Security) is the European Earth Observation Program, conducted jointly by the European Commission, the European Space Agency (ESA), the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT) and the member states. In the context of the Copernicus Collaborative Ground Segment initiative, DLR's German Remote Sensing Data Center (DFD) currently extends the ground station Neustrelitz to support the Sentinel-1 mission as external Local Ground Station (LGS) in addition to the Core Payload Data Ground Segment. This article describes the DLR LGS to be developed and operated and gives an overview of the collaborative ground segment services to be established by DLR's Maritime Safety and Security Lab in Neustrelitz. The activity aims to the fulfilment of all mission requirements, primarily to support the need for near real time performance up to 10 minutes, as those in maritime situational awareness. The development and implementation cover the task of Level 0 processing, based on DLR's Front End Processor (FEP), the implementation of the framework for real time processing up to level 2 (value adding), as well as the development of a hardware-independent virtual processing platform (VM-Ware).