AquaPulse

The Problem

The EU has nearly 100,000 local administrative units (Eurostat), the vast majority of which are small rural municipalities with limited capacity for environmental monitoring. The Czech Republic alone has 6,258 municipalities — and 89% of them have fewer than 2,000 inhabitants (Czech Statistical Office, 2024). A survey of 2,110 Czech municipalities under 2,000 inhabitants found that 14% of mayors consider drinking water supply a fundamental threat to their community's development over the next decade (Czudek et al., 2021, Water journal). The smallest villages — under 300 inhabitants — most often lack any water supply infrastructure at all.

The problem is accelerating. The Intersucho drought monitor reported that in mid-July 2023, virtually the entire Czech territory was under some degree of drought, with 35% in the two most severe categories. The Czech Hydrometeorological Institute confirmed that groundwater drought has persisted since 2015 across all deep aquifers of the Czech Cretaceous Basin. At the EU level, the 2022 compound drought and heat events caused an estimated €40 billion in losses (EEA), while agricultural crop losses in the Czech Republic alone ranged from 20–40%.

Powerful monitoring tools exist — the Copernicus European Drought Observatory (EDO), the Czech Intersucho system — but they are designed for expert analysts and researchers. Small municipalities have no GIS specialists, no environmental monitoring staff, and fragmented water management across approximately 7,700 infrastructure owners and 3,000 operators. The data exists. The accessibility gap does not close itself.

The Solution

AquaPulse is a lightweight web dashboard that translates Copernicus satellite data into plain-language drought and water stress alerts for non-expert municipal leaders.

For our hackathon MVP, we focus on one concrete use case: drought monitoring for a Czech municipality using Sentinel-2 imagery (10 m resolution, 3–5 day revisit) accessed freely via the Copernicus Data Space Ecosystem API. The dashboard computes the Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI) for the selected cadastral area, tracks its evolution over time, and presents results as a simple traffic-light system (green / amber / red). An AI layer generates a weekly plain-language briefing — in Czech and English — summarizing the current water stress situation and recommended actions.

No GIS expertise required. No expensive infrastructure. Just a browser.

EU Space Technologies

Copernicus Sentinel-2 (primary data source)We use Sentinel-2 Level-2A atmospherically corrected surface reflectance imagery to compute the Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI) using bands B03 (Green, 10 m) and B08 (NIR, 10 m). NDWI enables detection of water stress in vegetation and soil moisture changes at the cadastral level — a resolution that national-scale tools like EDO (which operates at ~5 km) cannot provide. With a 3–5 day revisit time, Sentinel-2 delivers near-real-time monitoring suitable for tracking drought progression week by week.

Copernicus Data Space Ecosystem APIAll data is accessed programmatically via the free Copernicus Data Space Ecosystem, using the Sentinel Hub Process API. This eliminates the need for local storage or high-performance computing — the processing happens in the cloud, making the solution viable even for resource-constrained municipalities.

Copernicus Emergency Management Service — European Drought Observatory (EDO)We use the Combined Drought Indicator (CDI) from EDO as a contextual reference layer, allowing mayors to see how their local NDWI readings compare to regional drought classifications. This grounds the local data in the broader European drought monitoring framework.

Galileo (future roadmap)In our post-hackathon roadmap, we plan to integrate Galileo-based positioning to map critical water infrastructure (wells, pumping stations, reservoirs) with high-accuracy coordinates, enabling precise spatial correlation between drought indicators and infrastructure vulnerability.

Value proposition: These EU space technologies turn what would otherwise require a team of GIS analysts and expensive software into a browser-based tool that any municipal leader can use. The free and open data policy of Copernicus is the economic foundation — it means the marginal cost of adding the next municipality is near zero.

EU Space for Water

Challenge: Securing equitable and efficient access to water (with secondary relevance to Disaster risk monitoring)

AquaPulse directly addresses the equity dimension of water access. Today, large cities have dedicated environmental departments, real-time monitoring systems, and the budget to commission expert analyses. Small rural municipalities — which represent the vast majority of European communities — have none of this. They react to drought only after wells run dry.

By making Copernicus satellite data accessible to non-expert users, AquaPulse shifts small municipalities from reactive crisis management to proactive, data-driven decision making. A mayor who sees an amber warning two weeks before a critical threshold can implement water restrictions early, coordinate with neighboring municipalities, or request regional support — instead of discovering the problem when taps stop flowing.

This contributes to protecting and managing water resources by:

• Enabling early detection of drought onset at the local level, before visible damage occurs
• Supporting evidence-based decisions on water use restrictions and prioritization
• Providing a standardized, comparable framework across municipalities, enabling regional coordination
• Democratizing access to EU space infrastructure so that water resilience is not a privilege of well-funded cities

Team

Ondřej Havlík — Project Lead Oversees project direction, coordinates between technical and business tracks, and ensures alignment with hackathon challenge criteria. Keeps the team focused on delivering a functional MVP within the 48-hour window.

Antonín Ferdan — Development / CEO of HUB Mladá BoleslavStartup veteran (proud failer and founder), brings hands-on experience in API integrations, AI implementation, and rapid prototyping. Leads the technical development of the dashboard and AI briefing layer. Deep understanding of small municipalities' real needs from years of consulting Czech mayors.

Michal Resl — Business & PartnershipsResponsible for the business model, market sizing, and go-to-market strategy. Builds the case for sustainable SaaS delivery to municipal associations and explores EU funding pathways (IROP, climate adaptation programmes) as the primary acquisition channel.

Denisa Sedlická — Marketing & UXOwns the user experience, visual identity, and pitch narrative. Ensures the dashboard interface is genuinely usable by non-technical municipal leaders and crafts the demo-day presentation that communicates impact clearly to the jury.