ARIES | ESA Space Solutions

Objectives of the service

ARIES project derives from the Feasibility Study performed within 5G for L’ART - “Law Enforcement and Emergency Response”, successfully completed in 2022. The needs derived from the following users’ needs:

receiving information about critical variables that can infer on active emergency.
updating and intuitive updated maps over the area affected.
optimizing the In-situ sensors network.
high performance forecast models to assess and perform simulations to study and plan an efficient and safe response.
automatic and reactive early warning systems.
ad-hoc dashboards to enclose all relevant data related to ongoing emergencies and provide a comprehensive overview regarding the evolution of the event.

ARIES develops and validates services tailored for two different emergencies, described below:

Wildfire emergencies: the three phases of the forest fires emergency management are supported by ARIES, through the integration of different data sources (i.e. Sentinel-2, PRISMA, drones and IoT sensors data), to support the End Users with the provision of actionable information (alert and precise localization of hazard, risk indices, fire front fire propagation, etc ) on a dedicated dashboard.
Landslide emergencies: the proposed service supports the three phases of landslides emergency management, through the integration of different data sources (i.e. COSMO-SkyMed, IoT sensors data and drones), to support the target End Users with the provision of actionable information (alert and precise localization of hazard, risk indices, etc).

Users and their needs

Wildfire related requirements/needs

Receive information about local weather conditions (with a time frequency of 15-20 minutes and a spatial resolution of 200 meters at most), temperature, relative humidity, wind intensity and direction, insolation, amount of combustion, type of fuel, FWI (available from Copernicus portal) and monitoring the wind direction and speed, FWI, NDVI and the progress of the fire front in near real time at least to prepare timely intervention and rescue operations.
Have a fire spreading model with a prediction horizon of 30 minutes, 1h and 2h and a 3D map image of Area of Interest (AoI).
Evaluating the presence of inhabited centers to delineate the emergency area.
Receiving information on the vegetative and undergrowth status to assess the possibility to create firebreaks to tracks the entry of firefighting equipment.
Estimating the most feasible minimum time path to reach residential area.
Assessing a fire spreading prediction model able to consider different environmental data, such as terrain morphology, vegetation status, wind characteristics, air temperature and humidity.
Receiving elaborated data from EO satellites images to evaluate the assess the phenomena on AoI.
Receiving an alert within 30 minutes starting from event detection.
Receiving a fire risk map with at most 7 days as update frequency.

Landslides related requirements/needs

Receiving weather forecasting information for each AoI.
Receive weather information with reference to different kind of soil (dry and wet).
Receive an early warning as a soon as landslide event is detected by using the same colour-based scale (green, yellow, orange, red).
Receive updated hydrogeological risk map with reference to the areas affected by landslides and/or flooding.
Have a resilient and low latency communication network to send and receive information related for each AoI.
Receive updated risk indexes (such as LAI, forecast rainfall) related to identified AoI.
Receive updated information about the velocity of landslide front and the presence of residential area in the AoI.
Receive information about hydrometric levels of rivers as indicators of the area’s most at risk, in relation to rain-induced landslides.
Receive nowcasting information to continuously monitor the hydrological rivers’ levels and the expected rainfall.
Have a precise estimation of event evolution to reduce damages and to enhance citizens safety.

Service/ system concept

The objective of the project is to provide to end-users, in particular the Italian Fire Brigade and the Italian/Regional Civil Protection, an efficient set of services to improve prevention and detection, monitoring and response for wildfires and landslides emergencies. The intended service will be developed starting from the existing building blocks, described in the following table, which will be customized and integrated to provide the services above mentioned.

A further key aspect emerging from the previous feasibility study is linked to the communication network, which must be resilient and secure and guarantee in real time the bidirectional exchange of information between the field and the emergency control room, regardless of the data collection technologies used; often, in the event of natural or man-made disasters, there are major communication problems caused by the disaster itself (in fact, it can damage fiber lines, base stations, etc. This objective can be achieved through the combined use of new technologies capable of improving the quality and interoperability of existing fire and hydrogeological risk, trough the access at several Radio Access Technologies (RAT) such as Satellite, terrestrial link, RPAS and IoT sensor network with narrowband/broadband satellite communications at different levels.

Space Added Value

The expected added value derive from the combined usage of several space assets:

Satellite communication:
- Iridium-Next (L-band; e.g. for Drones sensors and IoT sensor network) combined with 4G/5G to guarantee a resilient communication system.
EO Satellite systems:
- COSMO-SkyMed
- Copernicus Sentinels