The GMES and Africa Land Services Design Workshop took place at the JRC (Joint Research Centre of the European Commission) in Ispra, from 18 to 29 March 2019. GMES and Africa consortium project managers and technical experts were in attendance. From the WeMAST consortium, Panduleni Hamukwaya, the WeMAST Project Manager and Nosiseko Mashiyi, a technical expert from SANSA, were present.

This workshop provided the opportunity for the participants to learn and exchange ideas on the practical implementation of environmental monitoring services, in the framework of the GMES and Africa Support Programme. Among others, participants received first-hand insight into the JRC’s Big Data Platform (a.k.a. JEODPP1) for cloud computing of Sentinel‐1 and 2 data.

In particular, the participants were enabled to exploit the eStation 2.0 for implementing operational monitoring services. The eStation 2.0 is an Earth Observation processing system developed by the JRC, that facilitates the automated acquisition, processing, visualization and analysis of key environmental parameters derived from remotely sensed data. The platform may derive the parameters from SPOT/PROBAV, SEVIRI/MSG, TERRA-AQUA/MODIS and Copernicus Sentinel 2 and 3 Earth Observation products.