On December the 5th and 6th, 2017 the EO4EP team conducted Capacity Building workshops for Polish stakeholders. The event was held at the premises of the Institute of Meteorology and Water Management in Warsaw and gathered approx. 20 participants.
The training was attended by representatives of the Institute of Meteorology and Water Management (IMGW), Regional Water Management Authorities (RZGW) and the Reginal Crisis Management Centre. Similar to previous workshops, held in Armenia and Georgia, the training was divided into two parts. The first part involved an introduction to the basics of satellite remote sensing including Sentinel family description and EO data processing techniques. The second part was dedicated to products and services developed for Poland: river ice monitoring, biomass assessment, land use mapping and Digital Elevation Models production.
The EO4EP project in Poland is focused on improving water management and flood protection through development and delivery of web-based services, data analytics tools and various satellite-based information products which are being combined with field measurements and other existing data collection systems. These activities are supporting the provision of reliable and operational information for the World Bank “Odra-Vistula Flood Management Project” that is currently implemented in Poland in cooperation with Regional Water Management Authority (RZGW), the Ministry of Interior and Administration, the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Environment.
The service of River Ice Monitoring developed by Astri Polska will provide spatially continuous and automatically generated information about ice for main rivers in Poland. Its creation is especially important for Polish Water Management Authorities due to the fact that each year river ice accumulation generates serious flood threat. Thanks to the Earth Observation-based monitoring which augments existing methods of river ice monitoring, Polish crisis management authorities will be able to react in a more efficient way to the flood threat posed by ice jam, and better plan the ice breaking activities.
For the selected river basins the land cover mapping and Elevation Data were delivered by Geosystems Polska to provide up-to-date information on land cover and topography. The possibility of developing a VHR-based digital elevation model for hardly accessible floodplain areas laying along and outside the Polish eastern border have been also demonstrated. Both products were evaluated positively by IMGW and are planned to be used for hydrological modelling in the Bug river basin.
The last data product - Biomass which is still being developed by Astri Polska together with IMGW, is a promising tool, which helps to better understand relationship between growth and atrophy of underwater and surface vegetation along the rivers. Therefore, it can be used to improve the roughness coefficient which is the input data for hydrological modelling carried out in IMGW.
During the workshop the trainers focused on explaining the technical complexities of the products and their potential uses as well as limitations. The participants had the opportunity of hands-on training to test the applications and explore their content. End-users confirmed the usefulness of all services in view of the statutory activities of their institutions.
For more information about Poland service cases please see the country brochure.