Monitoring snow and land ice in Europe: The CryoLand geoportal
The EU-funded CryoLand project has developed an operational and sustainable downstream service for monitoring snow and land ice, the results of which are being exploited in the context of the Copernicus Global Land Service. The project’s showcase is an online geoportal which provides access to information on seasonal snow cover and land ice across Europe and its neighbouring areas. These information products are derived from Earth Observation satellite data, in particular from the Copernicus Sentinels.
Snow and land ice are key components of the water cycle and constitute important resources for supplying the world with water for human consumption, agriculture, hydropower generation, and other economic activities. The presence of snow and ice affects the radiation and energy balance of the Earth's surface, and therefore has an important role in regulating the planet's climate. On the other hand, snow, glaciers and lake or river ice can cause a variety of natural hazards (either directly or indirectly), including avalanches, floods brought on by snow melt, water outbreak from glacier lakes, and ice jams on rivers. Accurate observations of seasonal snow, including its extent, mass and melting conditions, are therefore not only of interest to climate change researchers, but are of great socio-economic importance.
CryoLand was an EU-funded project under the coordination of ENVEO (an SME located in Innsbruck, Austria) involving ten partners from six different EU countries (Austria, Finland, Norway, Romania, Sweden and Switzerland), which ran from February 2011 to January 2015. The project team created an online geoportal, an interactive mapping platform providing access to snow and land ice products. These products were designed in response to the needs expressed by users operating in various application fields, including hydrology, meteorology, climate research, water management and geotechnical engineering. The products are generated from Earth Observation satellite data, in particular from the Copernicus Sentinels, as well as in situ snow measurements.
The CryoLand Geoportal ((© CryoLand)
Snow and ice information at your fingertips
CryoLand products integrate data from the Copernicus Sentinel satellite family, as well as data from third-party missions made available through the Copernicus Data Warehouse. The Sentinels offer an excellent, sustained source of data for climate monitoring and operational applications with long-term continuity. Snow and land ice products are produced from satellite data using robust algorithms, which have been validated during the course of the project.
CryoLand services are built on a modern high-performing service infrastructure, based on interoperable and standardised web services. Individual products, as well as time series of products can be viewed, selected and downloaded interactively, and there is also an automatic download option for use in operational contexts.
CryoLand's system architecture and user interface were designed taking into account the system requirements collected at user workshops held during the life of the project. The architecture conforms with the INSPIRE[1] directive and abides by guidelines and international standards published by the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) and the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). CryoLand glacier products are also compliant with the specifications set by the Global Land Ice Measurements from Space (GLIMS) initiative.
As a result of this rigour, access to CryoLand products and datasets online is seamless, and the system allows them to easily be integrated into the user's application of choice (e.g. geographic information system, modelling environment, etc.).
CryoLand Geoportal showing Snow/Ice Layer section (© CryoLand)
The CryoLand products are freely and openly accessible to the public via the CryoLand geoportal – there are currently more than 23,000 snow and Lakeland ice products available.
CryoLand aimed to improve the management of a wide range of economic and ecological activities related to snow and ice. The users of CryoLand include agencies of the European Commission (e.g. the JRC, which operates the European Flood Awareness System), as well as organisations operating in the fields of water resource management, hydropower production, energy trading, natural hazard mitigation, transport and construction, climate monitoring and modelling, weather prediction, agriculture and tourism.
After the conclusion of the CryoLand project in January 2015, the production of the near real time products was taken up by the follow-on FP7 project Sen3App, and these products will be further exploited in the context of the Copernicus Global Land Service - one of the components of the Copernicus Land Monitoring Service. In this way, the long-term snow and land ice observations originating within CryoLand will continue to support environmental and resource management activities in Europe.
[1]Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the European Community
For further information: