The Earth Observation Science Virtual Laboratories of PrimeWater

The Institute for the Electromagnetic Sensing of the Environment (IREA) of the National Research Council (CNR) is a research institute with also has a consolidate experience in the field of remote sensing. Within PrimeWater, CNR-IREA leads the Earth Observation (EO) Science Virtual Lab for advanced water quality products. CNR-IREA guides the development and testing of algorithms for hyperspectral data processing and mapping and contributes in the validation of the PrimeWater service line. In this blog, Claudia Giardino, on behalf of IREA, explains the importance of Virtual Laboratories and highlights how these can be used within PrimeWater. 

“Virtual Laboratories (VL) are online services which may be used for a variable of purposes such as education (in which VL serve as online platform for students), as well as science and research where online VL are used as e-research space by experts of different fields to share ideas, run experiments and make comparative sciences.

Within the H2020 European project PrimeWater, the EO Science Virtual Lab aims at providing a platform where the partners of PrimeWater as well as researchers and scientists who do not belong to the project can run experiments. The main audience of this Virtual Lab is the research community experts in Earth Observation for water resources.

The science in these Virtual Laboratories is mainly driven by hyperspectral remote sensing for water quality mapping. Within PrimeWater, hyperspectral data from novel sensors will be used to map water constituents and aquatic vegetation in some of the PrimeWater case studies such as those in Australia, USA and Italy. Another application is a multiscale observation of a fresh water reservoir by sharing optical data acquired from multiple platforms.

The idea is that we are going to answer to some specific questions by using the state of the art methods according to some predefined experiments. We do expect that the main output of the EO Science Virtual Lab will be a common answer to some scientific questions that have been defined by the research partners. People who are used to work with hyperspectral data will find a common data set and a well-detailed procedure to provide information on water quality mapping (in respect to water constituents and aquatic vegetation) as well as to run different multiscale experiments. By starting from the same data and sharing predefined experiments, researchers and users of the VL will be able to run their own algorithms and methods for achieving a common result. In this way, comparative science will be possible.”

To learn more about the Earth Observation Science Virtual Laboratories visit here.

To learn more about the PrimeWater Case studies visit here.