Abstract
The Alps are amongst the most vulnerable and dynamic regions in Europe with respect to natural hazards, impacts of climate change or pressure on sensitive ecosystems. Processes such as snow-melt and the impact on run-off or drought damage of forest ecosystems need to be monitored to better understand the dynamics of the systems as well as to support an efficient and sustainable management of natural resources. While in-situ observatories offer precise monitoring information for well-defined locations, monitoring data, which are covering full areas in a consistent and transnational approach, are rare. The Sentinel Alpine Observatory (SAO) is an initiative of the Institute for Earth Observation at Eurac Research that has been launched in March 2017 (http://sao.eurac.edu). It showcases the output of various research projects and activities and features a number of Earth Observation products and services. They are mainly based on data from the Copernicus Sentinel program (EC/ESA) for monitoring key environmental variables in South Tyrol and the European Alps. With the goal of rendering access to relevant earth observation data as easy as possible for our own researchers and collaborators outside of the Sentinel Alpine Observatory and Eurac Research, we have developed an infrastructure and platform for collaborative research on the one hand and sharing of results with external non EO experts on the other hand. This includes activities in how to organize and store the data (e.g. using data cubes), how to access and process (e.g. Standardized metadata, API development and cluster computing) the data and how to distribute and visualize resulting products (e.g. exposing data by OGC standards and interactive web platforms). The initiative follows an open and participatory approach, integrating with other platforms like the Earth Observation Data Center (EODC) in Vienna and Alpine wide networks like the Virtual Alpine Observatory (VAO) and their AlpEnDAC infrastructure. But we have also strong ties to local authorities and companies as users of our products for very concrete problem solving, like discharge forecasting due to snow melt or forest change mapping in the fragile alpine environment.