NEANIAS is not only research and technology, but also the people who make it possible and put it in value. We present this conversation we had with Simone Mantovani, Managing Director at Meteorological and Environmental Earth Observation (MEEO) a small and medium enterprise located in Ferrara, Italy, in order to make NEANIAS project better known from different perspectives.

Simone has a background in Atmospheric Physics, and he spent his academic time working on cloud radar to study cloud microphysics. In 2004 he moved from clouds to Earth Observation to support the European Space Agency in evolving data dissemination services from traditional access service to innovative / pixel-based / cloud-ready / analysis-ready-data access services. Currently leading the MEEO technical team focused on democratizing data access, he is involved in relevant European projects to boost the exploitation of Copernicus and Third-party Mission datasets, including the generation of Sentinel-3 and Sentinel-5P Analysis Ready Data for the Registry of Open Data on Amazon Web Services.

• Thank you, Simone. What is your vision regarding NEANIAS? What was the main need you detected to participate?

NEANIAS contributes to evolve and increase the FAIR readiness level of Open Science. As an example, weather and climate services rely on data from systematic in-situ and remote observations fundamental to understand the current state of the global to local weather and climate, as well as expected future changes. EO technologies provide an unprecedented amount of data and measurements that confirm the effects of the climate change and global warming like an increasing number of extreme climate events such as hurricanes, typhoons, heatwaves, drought and floods.

The continuous growing of data volume generated by Space Agencies and relevant data producers (ESA, NASA, JAXA, ECMWF, EUMETSAT, EEA, Mercator-Ocean, ...) and the need to run data processing at scale are driving the way of doing science to the Cloud.

MEEO has a long and consolidated tradition in providing Earth Observation (EO) climate data services and identified as main need in NEANIAS the integration of reliable access service both in Atmospheric and Space domains.

• Do you want to explain us what is your main role in the project?

The role of MEEO in NEANIAS is twofold: from one side MEEO acts as technology provider to enlarge the core services portfolio with Data Exploration services, from the other MEEO is supporting the design and implementation of thematic services under the Atmospheric and Space domains.

The most exciting challenge for MEEO is to move Planetary Data to the Cloud! In the last decade with have been focused on generating Analysis Ready Data and enabling datacube pixel-based access services for Earth Observation data, and in NEANIAS we have the opportunity to extend this technology to Planetary Science Data and integrate it in the European Open Science Cloud.

• What are the connections that you find between fields as diverse as Space, Underwater and Atmospheric, the 3 thematic sectors of NEANIAS?

What makes different Space, Underwater and Atmospheric are the data: the rovers that are sounding the Mars surface are different from optical and radar instruments that are observing the Earth systems on board to Copernicus Sentinel satellite platforms. Data formats, spectral resolutions, spatial and temporal resolution are just few of the characteristics that make one data different from the other. Nevertheless, what makes Space, Underwater and Atmospheric are the data: the way the users search, access, process and present their data and results of interest to extract and information on the Earth surface or on the Seafloor or even on the Mars surface.

• And what opportunity can EOSC give us?

EOSC plays a relevant role on boosting the adoption of core technologies and services as well as on their sustainability. And this for MEEO means to integrate in the European Open Science Cloud the ADAM technology and boost the adoption by European researchers and more in general all scientists that can have access to EOSC.

The key point is to know the EOSC rules and the process to select a good candidate for integration in EOSC, that can be summarised on the Technology Readiness Level. Indeed, a good candidate must have TRL from 6 “Technology demonstrated in relevant environment (industrially relevant environment in the case of key enabling technologies)” to 8 “System complete and qualified”.

• NEANIAS is an innovation project with a clear focus on the users. Who are the final users of the services you are working on?

In the project lifecycle, MEEO is supporting the internal user communities with a main effort on the Space community represented by Jacobs University to set up the ADAM Space instance. We do expect more and more users coming with the Open Calls - the first is approaching in the next months -  that will play a relevant role in the promotion and uptake of NEANIAS core and thematic services.

• What are the main benefits you expect to provide them?

Saving time and supporting scalability needs are the main benefits offered to NEANIAS community members. Scientists and data users typically spend up to 80% of their time in accessing and pre-processing the data to generate Analysis Ready Data (ARD): data are distributed across different infrastructures, heterogeneous discovery and access services impact on the time to delivery, as well as the lack of skills on implementing cloud-ready interoperable services.

• Do you think that your NEANIAS solutions can have any application in other fields?

It is already happening! In the original activity plan, the main contribution of MEEO was planned in Atmospheric and Space domains, but as a consortium we realized that the core technology can be re-used and integrated to support also the Underwater domain. Indeed, the flexibility and maturity of the Data exploration core service is going to be adopted to manage NEANIAS generated products and enable interoperable discovery, view and access services for ocean and marine products.

•  Do you think that NEANIAS may give additional value to society, beyond technology?

Being a technology provider it’s easier for me to see the value of the technology, and the continuous evolution of technology helps the Science to evolve and this gives additional value to the society. If we think at the recent COVID-19 epidemic and the need to find the vaccine, it’s evident that such excellent result of having a vaccine in less than one year is the result of a large number of scientists from different research institutes around the World: to achieve the result it’s not important to know how many experiments the scientists did, what is important is that scientists have reliable and effective tools and ingredients to run their experiments. The same applies to NEANIAS: being fast in exploring and investigating enormous volume of data, will support the evolution of algorithm and knowledge extraction with impact in the different domains being the discovery of ice on Mars or a proper understanding of the key drivers in the climate change.

• What are the main research centres with which you collaborate?

Out of NEANIAS project, MEEO collaborates with a wide list of research institutes and relevant European players: European Space Agency (ESA), European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT), European Union Satellite Centre (SatCen), Institute of Atmospheric Sciences and Climate (CNR-ISAC).

In NEANIAS - during the first year of the project - we have been mainly in contact with Jacobs University: moving from the Planet Earth to Mars it’s like learning a new language but now we can add into our CV Martians under the known languages section J.

•   After 1 year of NEANIAS life, what is your view about the progress and our achievements?

With a lot parallel tasks in progress and the concurrent discussions with experts in different domains, it’s never easy to give an actual and accurate view of the progress, and in some cases we evolve too fast: moving the data into the Cloud was the first mile to cover, enabling interoperable services at scale to increase data availability and fast exploration service was the second mile ... and this is the achievement: we are 2 miles less far from EOSC. “It’s our first small step for a scientist, one giant leap for EOSC community”.

• The Coronavirus health crisis began almost at the same time as NEANIAS started. What has been your main concern and how have you managed to solve it?

Team building is one of the most effective way to progress in the innovation projects, so it was not easy at all to start a new project and build the team across the project partners during the Coronavirus health crisis… I miss the social events after a long day discussion about algorithm, technology, activity planning!

We managed to temporary convert face-to-face into virtual meetings: it took a while to get in this new comfortable zone but held your presentation in pyjama has an invaluable value. It’s just a parenthesis ... we will start moving and meeting face-to-face soon. 

• How do you see the NEANIAS results in the long term? (for instance, in 5 years)

I see the NEANIAS core and thematic services progressively integrated in the European Open Science Cloud, with an increasing number of users requesting more and more data to address Earth and Planetary challenges.

• Lastly, any wish for the next 6 months?

6 months it’s a long perspective, we have the mid-term review with the stakeholders approaching in few months and we are all busy in preparing for a successful meeting to present the first bunch of NEANIAS services.

Thank you very much!