Industry and Entrepreneurship
Earth observation
Copernicus
Cycling in town but worried by air pollution? A definitive solution is not immediately available, but a new EU application can help you avoid riding your bicycle on days with poor levels of air quality. This is possible thanks to Copernicus, the European Earth Observation Programme, which provides real time access to air pollution data.
The ObsAIRve service is only one of several applications using the flow of vital data from satellites of the Copernicus array, which work in tandem with a crucial ground-based infrastructure.
Advanced earth observation will help monitor and prevent hazardous environmental changes, such as the spread of greenhouse gases, the thinning of the ozone layer or the changing levels of solar ultraviolet radiation reaching the ground. Increased awareness of these phenomena is crucial to counteract them in an effective manner.
"Copernicus has now reached maturity as a programme and all its services will enter soon into the operational phase. Thanks to greater data availability user take-up will increase, thus contributing to that growth that we so dearly need today."
Copernicus will also be valuable for the security of our planet and our communities. It will, for instance, contribute to fighting natural and man-made catastrophes by enabling us to step up the quality and the rapidity of emergency response.
It will also protect critical infrastructure against the risk of terrorist attacks, and provide key and timely information to coastal guards in their increasingly challenging tasks of patrolling the sea and maritime borders.
Citizens can also profit from the business opportunities Copernicus will generate. Around 38 000 new jobs are expected to be created thanks to this programme between 2015 and 2030, for an overall financial benefit of some €30 billion.
Sectors positively affected by Copernicus are likely to be space manufacturing, data production and dissemination services. Indirectly, a variety of other economic segments will benefit from the use of accurate earth observation, such as water, transport, oil and gas, non-life insurance, agriculture or electricity.
The European Commission has been working on this project since the late 1990s, when they launched the Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES) together with the European Space Agency.
Copernicus is simply the new name for GMES. The name change is not accidental as it coincides with a fresh impetus to the project. As the scientist Nicolaus Copernicus was the catalyst to better understand our world in the 16th century, so the programme which today carries his name will give us a thorough understanding of our changing planet, enabling us to take concrete actions to improve citizens’ quality of life.