Coupling crowdsourcing, earth observations, and E-GNSS in a novel flood emergency service in the cloud

Despite the growing development of space-based systems aimed at monitoring and studying natural hazards, floods continue to harm humankind worldwide, causing enormous human and economic losses. In view of improving the existing Copernicus Emergency Management Service (EMS) we propose FLOODIS: a novel Copernicus downstream service that exploits existing space assets together with crowdsourcing and state-of-the-art cloud computing technologies in order to provide a fast, flexible and scalable flood emergency service. After collecting the requirements from end-users, we define the FLOODIS architecture and implement a FLOODIS prototype. We also study the challenges related to consider real-time data coming from modern social networks like Twitter. Finally, we draft a business case for FLOODIS by analyzing the potential market along with the estimated social benefits brought by the proposed service.