ExtremeEarth (http://earthanalytics.eu/) is a recently funded innovative research project that will develop new Artificial Intelligence techniques and software for extracting information and knowledge from big Copernicus data. The project is coordinated by the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and it will receive nearly 6 million euros from the Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme of the European Commission.
The ExtremeEarth partners are international leaders from world-class universities and industry in the areas of Artificial Intelligence (including Deep Learning and Linked Data), Remote Sensing / satellite Earth Observation, Big Data and Distributed Systems.
The techniques and tools of ExtremeEarth will target two of the Thematic Exploitation Platforms (TEP) of the European Space Agency ESA: Food Security TEP and Polar TEP. The large data-stream (Big Data) Earth Observation data that will be used is produced by the Sentinel satellites of Copernicus (www.copernicus.eu), the European program for monitoring the Earth.
In this project, VISTA GmbH, located in Munich/Germany, will focus on the Food Security Use Case and provides the best suited approaches for the integrated monitoring and modelling of dynamic and transborder Earth processes like the water cycle and vegetation growth to provide a final product of the highest usefulness – water availability for irrigation management – to the users in the Food Security and agriculture community.

Dr. Heike Bach, founder and CEO of VISTA GmbH commented: “With this new approach we will be able to combine seasonal information about water storage e.g. in the Alps with the highly dynamic water demand in agricultural areas, e.g. in the Danube area and give large scale recommendations for private farmers, but also for national governments about sustainable water usage.”