Planet´'S Modern Information Sources for Frequent Status Assessment and Risk Modelling

Our Planet faces dramatic changes due to changing climate. It is obvious, that with changing environmental conditions all risk management strategies have to be critically reviewed frequently. But such process needs frequently updated status information about the any of the risk factors and even better, a projection of their status into the future. Today, the COPERNICUS program of the European Union provides valuable Sentinel-2 satellite observation free of charge. This is a huge source of information about our environment and shall be utilized wherever possible. It allows to derive information about vegetation cover, relief conditions, water quality, sun exposure and many more fields of interest with a spatial resolution (pixel size) of 10m on the ground every 3-5 days. Such temporal resolution may sometimes not be sufficient, considering the frequent cloud cover in the areas which interest us. If an acquisition date falls on a cloudy day, then the next image can be expected only 3-5 days later, which is then hopefully cloud-free. Sometimes the 10m spatial resolution of Sentinel-2 satellite is not sufficient to assess risk factors.