IRIDE

The project

IRIDE is an integrated Earth Observation system launched under Italian National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR) and coordinated by European Space Agency (ESA) and Italian Space Agency (ASI), consisting of a satellite constellation of over 60 units and a ground-based operational infrastructure. It delivers a wide range of geospatial services designed around user needs, including coastal marine monitoring, ground movement, security, land cover, hydrometeorology, water resource management, air quality, and emergency response. These services provide maps, multi-temporal monitoring and analysis of land and sea through the processing of satellite data integrated with model outputs, ground-based networks, and open or user-supplied data.

What MEEO does

Within Lot 1, MEEO develops and implements the IRIDE "Air Quality Monitoring and Forecasting" services which provide Earth Observation data and Air Quality Model output in Analysis Ready Data (ARD) format, aiming to: (a) facilitate the use of satellite data, providing data that is ready for web mapping applications; (b) support end-users in exploiting satellite data for assimilation into forecasting models or for comparison with model outputs.

Within Lot 3, MEEO develops the full processing chain for high-resolution nitrogen-fixing crop mapping: from Sentinel-2 MultiSpectral Instrument (MSI) imagery, the pipeline applies spectral band selection, cloud masking, and super-resolution (10m → 3.3m), then classifies crops via convolutional neural networks, generating ARD outputs at 3 m resolution delivered twice a year.