Despite all the progress that has been made, air pollution still poses an enormous health risk in the 21st century. According to the German Federal Environmental Agency, every year more than 40,000 people die in Germany from particulate matter alone, and the number of new cases is in the hundreds of thousands. The aim of SAUBER is to make the rarely used data and services of the Copernicus space program accessible and to transfer them into digital services for sustainable urban and regional development. SAUBER will not only provide a comprehensive and detailed overview of current air quality, but also, thanks to Artificial Intelligence will also provide forecasts and simulations of future air quality. For example, particularly heavily polluted or endangered areas can be identified in advance. This makes it possible to reduce or even avoid the threat of air pollution by forward-looking planning or rapid countermeasures. SAUBER thus goes well beyond existing information systems. As a rule, they are based only on the (extrapolated) data of selective measurements and are therefore too finely granular as a basis for holistic strategies for air improvement. On the other hand the recently launched satellite missions Sentinel-2, Sentinel-3 and Sentinel-5P allow air pollutants such as nitrogen dioxide, particulate matter or sulphur dioxide to be captured areawide from orbit with unprecedented quality and resolution. These satellite data will be refined with further (current and historical) data, e.g. weather, traffic, infrastructure, topography or local measurement data, in order to record the relevant influencing variables of air pollution and at the same time increase the level of detail. SAUBER mainly uses Open Data and in return will make suitable data and services available to third parties as Open Data via mCLOUD, MDM and CODE:DE.
The project was officially launched on October 1st, 2018 and will run three years. The consortium leader is Software AG. Other research partners are geomer GmbH and its subcontractor, the start-up company meggsimum from the Rhine-Neckar metropolitan region, the German Aerospace Center, the Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute, the Institute for Information Systems at the Hof University of Applied Sciences and the Leibniz Institute for Ecological Spatial Development.
