CERTO is undertaking the research and development (R&D) necessary to address the above discrepancy and gap by producing harmonised water colour datasets suitable for integration in the Copernicus services. The project is using Sentinel-2 MSI and Sentinel-3 OLCI data to map water quality at the regional and European scale, across a range of water body environments to demonstrate the applicability of the new methods. Factors that have historically restricted remote sensing observations over transitional water bodies such as atmospheric interference in the satellite signal and the impacts of adjacency and bathymetry effects are investigated and mitigation techniques are being developed. All CERTO outputs shall be brought together into a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), the CERTO prototype, which can be “plugged in” the Copernicus services.

The six case studies for CERTO include three estuaries (Elbe, Tagus and Tamar) and three lagoons (Curonian, Razelm-Sinoe and Venice).