CENTAUR aims and application areas
CENTAUR aims to improve risk awareness and preparedness against climate change and security issues by developing and demonstrating new service components for Copernicus Emergency Management Service (CEMS) and Copernicus Service in Support for EU External Action and Security Actions (CSS-SESA).
CENTAUR will specifically address urban flooding risks using Earth Observation data and city-level meteorological forecasts and will address water and food insecurity in developing countries by defining indicators and crisis indexes sensitive to these issues and modelling associated risks of political instability, conflicts, and displacements.
The User Requirements Review Meeting
To fully harness the future benefits of CENTAUR, the project needs to be based on the users’ needs and priorities. To this end, a User Requirement Review Meeting (URR) was held online on 8 June 2023, with the partners of the CENTAUR consortium and the Advisory Board members.
After interviewing a set of diverse stakeholders interested in the application areas of CENTAUR, we gathered their preferences and priorities and reflected on ways to tailor the project’s developments so that it will meet the needs of our future users. This included details on the expected timing for delivery of the data, preferred platform, and many other information details of the optimal end product, which we are aiming to deliver. More specifically, the project’s outputs will be accessible online, through sites such as a Geoportal, where data will be visualised and possibly downloaded.
Moreover, we discussed the requirements and definitions of the use cases which the project will focus on. One example is the Mozambique use case, based on the CEMS Rapid Mapping activation EMSR348 triggered in March 2019 by tropical cyclone Idai, which affected 1.85 million people around Beira. Mozambique is one of the selected “cold cases”, i.e. well-documented crisis situations that happened in the past which will be used to calibrate CENTAUR models and validate developed indexes and indicators. More details on our use cases, ranging from Europe to Sub-Saharan Africa, can be found in the “Project” section of our website.
We sincerely thank everyone that took part in the meeting and their valuable contributions throughout this process.
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