The EEA has been entrusted with the implementation of the European Ground Motion Service (EGMS) as part of the Copernicus Land Monitoring Service (CLMS). The implementation of EGMS requires significant efforts to define quantitative and qualitative measures to evaluate the correspondence between the so-called ground truth (and its inherent uncertainty) and satellite measurements. Since Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) data production involves the application of thresholds and filters to remove unwanted phase artefacts the results can contain systematic effects, outliers or simply measurement noise. The overall purpose of this call for tenders is the independent validation of the EGMS product portfolio, which is currently being produced under the contract resulting from call for tenders EEA/DIS/R0/20/011.

The main objective of the validation process is to confirm that the European Ground Motion Service (EGMS) products are consistent with user requirements and product specifications, and with the expected range of applications and use. Information on validation is of great interest to the end users since it will indicate which phenomena the EGMS is able to capture, which are the possible fields of application and the constraints in the applicability of the EGMS products.

The main purpose of the validation process is to check if the EGMS products are consistent with other measures independent from the interferometric data processing and if/to what extent they meet end user expectations. The validation process shall encompass EGMS results and supporting documentation and must be carried out on the basis of available ancillary datasets that have not been previously included in the EGMS production.

Tenderers must consider the following key principles when specifying and proposing the implementation approach of the EGMS validation task:

• validation results must be reproducible;

• the data used to perform the validation must be reusable;

• it shall be possible to reuse and migrate the complete EGMS Validation System Environment to a predefined cloud service provider of the EEA’s choosing;

• the validation methodology, scripts, tools, and data holdings must be developed, implemented, and documented with the aim of underpinning the three previous principles.