Cosmo-skymed data exploitation: Global trend, perspectives and lessons learnt

Earth Observation (EO) applications are playing a never greater role to support actions at local and global scale. Actually, EO platforms are collecting more data than ever before and at a pace unmatched in human history. The diffusion of EO data is creating an incredible opportunity for downstream applications and value-adding services, allowing to capture higher knowledge about our planet that is vital to respond to socio-economic and environmental challenges. In this context, COSMO-SkyMed mission offers an efficient response to actual needs of institutions, scientific users, industrial players, technicians and politician decision makers. As a matter of fact, thanks to its features, since 2008, Italy plays a key role in the international EO context, being a largely exploited Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) mission during awareness and disaster events for damage assessment and support to logistics during the crisis, as well as for regular monitoring of areas at risk during the early warning phase and for the monitoring during the recovery operations in the post crisis phase. The analysis of the distributed data in the last three years (2014-2016) to the EO institutional user community confirmed that the geo-hazard risk management cover the most significant portion of the total COSMO-SkyMed delivered data in the international framework (more than 45%). In the last, a statistics analysis based on the on-going projects and COSMO-SkyMed data exploitation from EO users community in terms of application domains, sensor modes and geographical areas of interest is also provided, summarizing the lessons learnt achieved in almost six years of operational activity. © International Astronautical Federation IAF. All rights reserved.