The main challenge of the Hydrology Thematic Exploitation Platform (TEP) is offering an ensemble of services to the Hydrology community based mainly on the exploitation of different EO data and tools. The goal of these services is facilitating the access, exploitation, processing and visualization of different type of data (EO, in-situ, socioeconomic or meteorological data) to the end-users in the different applications related to water management such as water resource management, floods monitoring, drought monitoring or water quality monitoring.
As water touches all societal and environmental domains, from the pint of view of end-users, there is a need for integrated, open water information services offering efficient access to cross-regional, multidisciplinary water information for all types of end-users, such as governments, scientists, businesses and civil society. The needs are particularly high in the developing world which is often data sparse. By exploiting the untapped potential of new IT cloud environment, new plethora of data of Sentinels and Third Party Missions data and new SaaS customized to the hydrology community needs, water-related challenges can be better mastered by a combination of holistic understanding of the water cycle together with evidence- based governance and increased public awareness.
In this process, EO data could play in particular a much more significant role if properly included in existing and new decision support tools for water managers and policy makers.