The current operative usage of Space by Swedish governmental bodies are restricted to forest harvest mapping, ice breaker services, meteorology, disaster mitigation and to some extent to water quality assessment, land cover mapping, agricultural monitoring and ground motion services. The non-governmental usages are mainly for precision agriculture, forest mapping and change detection.
Area of interests and brief review of general needs and service demand
The main interest for services and information has been from the larger governmental agencies within the fields of marine and fresh water management, forestry, agriculture, meteorology, land survey and nature protection. The common need that the Swedish National Space Agency has taken action on is the combined need for data storage, processing capacity and algorithms and methods. The Space agency has initiated Swedish National Space Data Lab as the Collaborative Ground Segment in Sweden to provide Copernicus data and AI-methods for analyses.
Potential usage of Copernicus data and services
The potential usage is well established larger than the above listed current use cases. There are however some thresholds that have been identified. One of the major thresholds are the bad geometric accuracy of the Sentinel 2 a and Sentinel 2 b data. Other thresholds are that there is still need for high level expertise about the data, that data scientists has low knowledge of the data sources and that many Earth Observation professionals lack expertise in data science. Once again this is the main task to overcome by the Swedish National Space Data Lab.