- Starion, a CS Group company, is developing a decision-support service for water resource management and monitoring of water-related events in Italy.
- Funded by the Italian Space Agency (ASI), the Water Intelligence with Satellite-based Estimation and Regulation (WISER) project will be implemented as a service (on a public cloud platform) that will feature a digital twin.
- WISER will use artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms to derive hydrological information from satellite data and in-situ measurements, with an initial focus on Southern Italy.
A consortium led by Starion is starting to design and develop a service for water resource management and monitoring of extreme water-related events. Funded by the Italian Space Agency (ASI), under the Italian National Recovery and Resilience Plan – Complementary Fund (PNRR-FC), the WISER project will run for 15 months and initially focus on Southern Italy, with the potential to scale the solution nationwide in the future.
Situational awareness is a key focus for CS Group, which has a portfolio of platforms that use space data to provide essential information for resource management and crisis response, including FloodCARE and SAFEPLACE. The WISER platform will integrate satellite Earth observation (EO) data, meteorological forecasts and in-situ measurements into a digital twin enhanced by AI algorithms for extracting geo-information from satellite data, such as precipitation, soil moisture, evaporation, river flow and reservoir capacity. WISER’s high spatial and temporal resolutions will support users in optimising management of water resources and flood predictions, including assessments of related infrastructure damage.
Globally, water scarcity is a growing problem due to pollution, demographic growth and climate change. In Southern Italy, the most common water-related issues are regional droughts. Although the water crisis of 2024 and 2025 was reversed by a series of storms, water losses from distribution networks can reach up to 50% in some areas due to aging water infrastructures, which are at risk from increasingly frequent and intense, short-duration extreme rainfall events. The consortium will therefore deliver two integrated and complementary platforms within WISER tailored to support operational decision-making in these different scenarios.
Consortium roles
As project lead, Starion is responsible for coordinating the consortium’s activities and for designing the overall system architecture, defining the satellite data strategy and use cases, developing the user interface service platform, carrying out the end-to-end integration, leading the project’s AI activities and defining the future service roadmap. Drawing on its expertise in EO and AI, Starion will develop advanced algorithms for water-resource monitoring and forecasting, integrate data from satellite and environmental sources, and prepare the service for future commercial deployment.
Stefano Tatoni, Starion Italia Managing Director, said: “Water management is an increasingly high profile issue in Italy, which is why this project feels particularly pertinent for the Italian team who will be working on it. We’re looking forward to applying our skills in AI and knowledge of satellite EO data to this task in collaboration with the other members of this consortium, who I know are equally passionate about this project.”
From a technical perspective, Starion will be supported by MEEO, Latitudo 40, GECOSistema and Geonautics, with the latter carrying out in situ bathymetric surveys to validate some of the AI algorithms to be developed. The Italian National Research Council’s Institute of Geosciences (CNR-GEO) will supply input data for the hydrological model and provide the digital twin concept, while Acquedotto Pugliese (AQP) will lead the service validation from an end-user perspective, including simulating extreme rainfall events in selected urban area to assess their potential impacts.
AQP manages one of the most extensive water infrastructure systems in Europe, serving the Puglia region in southern Italy and part of Campania. Its task is becoming harder every year, due to the combination of increasingly frequent extreme weather events and ageing infrastructure, some of which was built more than a century ago. For AQP, it is important that any tools developed for infrastructure management meet the needs of the people who will actually use them, which is why the company is pleased to be involved in the development of WISER and looks forward to using the platform once it is complete.
Main image contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2016), processed by the European Space Agency
