D2.8 - Arctic Window of Copernicus, The Arctic PASSION perspective

Arctic PASSION is contributing to the co-creation and implementation of a coherent, integrated Arcticobserving system. It aims to overcome known flaws in the present observing system by refining itsoperability, improving and extending pan-Arctic scientific and community-based monitoring and theintegration with Indigenous and Local knowledge. It also aims at streamlining the access andinteroperability of Arctic Data systems and services and contribute to ensuring the economic viabilityand sustainability of the observing system.In the call that Arctic PASSION responded to, it was specifically stated that an Arctic Window ofCopernicus should be established. No details were provided by the EU stakeholders on what this shouldbe, but the project learned that Copernicus had started development of Copernicus Hubs, including aCopernicus Arctic Hub. To fully understand the landscape of Copernicus services, Arctic PASSIONperformed an analysis of Copernicus services, their interoperability and potential products of relevancefor the Arctic. Main findings of this report is that Copernicus services from an interoperabilityperspective are highly heterogeneous making it hard to integrate the Copernicus data in decisionsupport systems.The ideas outlined in this document support the idea that users should have the opportunity to find andlook at relevant Copernicus products, but also be able to integrate these into existing value chains,processing environments or decision support systems. In this context this document suggests extensionsof functionality in the Copernicus Arctic Hub. Improvements in functionality the project think willincrease the impact of Copernicus data. These improvements will require modifications in existing datadocumentation (e.g. discovery metadata, to make them suitable for machine interpretation) and webservices. If such changes are not possible, it should be considered to evaluate Copernicus Data SpaceEcosystem for this purpose as this already implements some of the requirements identified.