The Copernicus Australasia Regional Data Hub (the Hub) is Australasia’s gateway to Sentinel satellite data from Europe’s Copernicus Programme in our region, covering a third of the Earth’s surface. A free, open and trusted service that has shared over 10 Petabytes (PB) of Sentinel data, to a monthly average of 700 users from 40 different countries, since going fully operational in April 2018! The Copernicus Programme is a € 6.7 billion and 20+ year programme, financed and managed by the European Commission (EC). The Sentinel satellites that collect this data are built and operated by the European Space Agency (ESA) and the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT). A cooperation arrangement between the EC and the Commonwealth (represented by Geoscience Australia) to access and use Sentinel data for the delivery of innovative products and services for societal benefit created the opportunity for the Hub, which is enabled by technical agreements with ESA and EUMETSAT. A consortium of five government agency Partners fund the Hub. So what’s Geoscience Australia’s (GA) role in all this and why is the Hub important? Furthermore, what does Eurovision have to do with it? Come join me to find out.

One annoying geodetic variable is a treasure trove of information to meteorologists. This talk will focus on a project in partnership with the BoM, RMIT and FrontierSI turned our estimates of the tropospheric delay in our GPS analysis into useful information for weather forecasting systems. The system works by measuring the time it takes GPS signals from satellites to reach ground receivers. Signals can be slightly delayed by moisture in the troposphere, causing what's known as a zenith total delay, so scientists measure this delay to assess air moisture While the technology could be applied almost anywhere, it is particularly valuable in a sparsely populated country like Australia where there is a lack of ground-based meteorological observation stations. Atmospheric water vapour is highly variable and non-linear in nature, yet it is important for accurate weather forecasting of storms. Having a direct observation from GPS provides an exciting opportunity for near and real-time weather forecasting systems.

Rapid population growth and an increasing demand for water has been depleting groundwater resources in the Central Valley of California for decades. The lack of sufficient ground monitoring networks poses serious challenges to water management efforts and puts the sustainability of groundwater resources at risk. This seminar will demonstrate how the satellite remote sensing techniques of Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) and the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) can be applied to monitor groundwater resources and aquifer response to drought. The final part of this seminar will describe how GA is currently trialling the demonstrated methods as remote groundwater monitoring tools in the Great Artesian Basin of Australia.