Jérôme Bruniquel

Thales Alenia Space, 26, avenue Champollion, BP 33787, 31037 Toulouse Cedex 1, France jerome.bruniquel@thalesaleniaspace.com

ABSTRACT

MarCoast aims at delivering operational satellite-based services to end users in the field of marine and coastal applications. This paper describes the purpose and the scope of the project and highlights the main progresses made since the beginning of the project in November 2006. 1. INTRODUCTION

MarCoast is part of the ESA GMES Service Element (GSE) programme. The project aims at delivering operational satellite-based services to end users. The MarCoast portfolio of marine and coastal services is composed of different service lines that cover either the Oil Spill or the Water Quality application fields over almost all European waters. MarCoast propose a set of 5 downstream service lines, which are:

- Oil spill alert and polluter identification - Oil spill drift forecast - Water quality monitoring - Algae bloom detection and alert - Water quality indicators.

In addition, one upstream service line (Metocean data), providing generic oceanic products over all European waters, is part of MarCoast. MarCoast products make use of all sensors dedicated to marine applications: ASAR and RSAT-1 for oil spills, MERis and MODIS for water quality applications. Altimeters, radiometers, and scatterometers support the production of metocean data. In the future, GMES sentinels 1 and 3 will be the main missions on which MarCoast services will rely on. There is a strong commitment of the end users, formalized through Service Level Agreement (SLA), signed between a service provider and a user. Signed SLA is mandatory to start any service activity.

2. OBJECTIVES

The main goals of MarCoast, as part of the GSE; are: - Demonstrate progress towards long-term

sustainability for GMES services in the oil pollution and water quality sectors

- Deliver services and benefits to users on progressively larger scales

- Establish a durable, open, distributed GMES Service Provision Network

- Establish standards and working practices for GMES Services in the area of oil pollution and water quality.

The project ensures these objectives through:

- A strong consortium of 36 partners with a high background experience gained within previous GMES projects

- Effective user engagement based on a user driven agenda and SLA that guarantee the performance and quality of the information which is delivered.

The project team that supports all MarCoast activities is composed of:

- A project consortium, composed of various partners from 11 different countries, in charge of setting-up and scaling-up the activities, led by Thales Alenia Space

- A User Executive Body (UEB) whose role is to assess and give feed-back about any user oriented issues related to the proposed service network and its evolutions

- A Service Strategy group that provide overall, independent high-level guidance to the service network for the duration of the contract.

3. GEOGRAPHICAL COVERAGE

Fig. 1 and fig. 3 indicate the name and location of service providers that are part of MarCoast, respectively for the oil spill and the water quality while fig. 2 and fig. 4 display the areas over which at least one MarCoast service run. Geographical expand will be done very soon with the addition of a Portuguese service provider.

MARINE AND COASTAL ENVIRONMENTAL INFORMATION SERVICES: THE MARCOAST PROJECT AFTER 18 MONTHS

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Proc. ‘Envisat Symposium 2007’, Montreux, Switzerland 23–27 April 2007 (ESA SP-636, July 2007)

Figure 1: Map of Oil Spill Service Providers

Figure 2: Map of Oil Spill Services

Figure 3: Map of Water Quality Service Providers

Figure 4: Map of Water Quality Services

4. SERVICES DESCRIPTION

4.1. Oil spill alert and polluter identification The purpose is to establish and to provide an operational oil spill detection information service meeting the needs for both routine surveillance and customised information over areas displayed in fig. 2. The distributed information includes identified spill information and supporting information like meteorological data and sea state conditions when available. Routine surveillance is progressively taken over by the European Maritime Safety Agency (EMSA) from April 2007, MarCoast oil spill services focusing on adding value to the basic products and on the qualification of the services. This service line is led by KSAT, Norway.

Figure 5: Oil Slick detected by ASAR during the

Prestige event (©ESA & Boost Technologies)

4.2. Oil spill drift forecast The MarCoast surveillance service provides the drift forecast service with oil spill alerts and basic spill parameters. An essential element of the drift forecast services is a the drift model and the metocean data which are used to drive the model. This service line is led by BMT, UK.

Figure 6: Oil spill drift forecast (detection done by

Telespazio, numerical modelling by HCMR)

4.3. Water quality monitoring The purpose of this service line is to supply products that allow a near-real time surveillance of water quality indicators such as chlorophyll, transparency, TSM, Yellow substance, Gelbstoff, and SST, with a daily, weekly or monthly frequency. The service is tailored at the regional scale over almost all of the European seas as indicated in fig. 4. This service line is led by Planetek, Italy.

Figure 7: Chlorophyll map over Adriatic sea (processed

by ACRI-ST, distributed by Planetek Italia)

4.4. Algae bloom detection and alert The pan-European algae bloom service provides a basic daily detection of algae blooms for the whole European sea region and automated email alert to registered users. The service covers the coastal and offshore waters of all European Union countries plus Norway (from Spain, Portugal and Ireland in the West to Greece in the South-East to Finland and Norway in the North-East), i.e. approximately the region bound by latitudes 35°N and 70° N and by longitudes 12°W and 30°E. This service line is led by MUMM, Belgium.

Figure 8: Pan-European algae bloom map (© MUMM)

Figure 9: Chlorophyll map (© Brockmann Consult)

4.5. Water quality indicators The service is targeted to end-users in charge of providing information to support decisions regarding measures to take to protect lives, properties and loss of natural values in protected areas. The pressures from climate change are difficult to observe in the local/regional seas due to the spatial and temporal variability. A view at European scale is needed while keeping a capability to characterise the status at basin level. The proposed service assists end-users in a number of ways: (i) to help the provision of the required policy-compliance information, (ii) to answer questions from policy makers, and (iii) to assist in the formulation of new environmental policies. Representative monitoring of phenomena like eutrophication, one of the major issues in terms of anthropogenic pressure, needs information on the quality of phytoplankton (composition, abundance, biomass, blooms). As supportive and interpretative parameters, information related to the concentration of pigments (Chlorophyll a), transparency, temperature, salinity, oxygen, nutrients, and the hydro-morphological parameters as currents and wave exposure is also aggregated. This service line is led by ACRI-ST, France.

Figure 10: Chlorophyll map based on MERIS image

(© ACRI-ST)

4.6. Metocean data The purpose of this service element is to distribute to users this information useful for:

- Oil spill detection, to improve the false alarm rate and customise the service with ancillary data;

- Water Quality and Algae Bloom alert to provide global ocean physical parameter;

- Oil spill and Algae Bloom forecast models to provide currents and nest drift models.

All the European seas will be covered. The portfolio of data available ranges from near real time observations (ocean colour, sea surface temperature, …) to analysis and forecasts produced by oceanographic or atmospheric models (winds, waves, currents, 3D ocean temperature, etc).

Figure 11: Example of an image providing surface

current information (© Mercator Ocean)

In addition, to the availability of the data, the service proposes also tailored processing of the produced data allowing an easy, robust and accurate interfacing with the user’s forecasting applications. 5. INVOLVEMENT OF USERS

5.1. Users at present So far, 56 users from 16 different countries receive MarCoast services and have signed at least one SLA with at least one service provider:

- For the Oil Spill, 8 SLAs have been signed, among which 2 address several users with a good federating organization

- For the Water Quality, 30 SLAs have been signed (1 SLA per end user)

- 8 internal SLAs have been signed internally in the frame of the Metocean data service line.

Since the beginning of the project, 19 new SLAs have been signed (2 for the Oil Spill and 17 for the Water Quality), among which 4 with Denmark and 1 with Romania. Around 15 new SLAs are under negotiation. The type of end users ranges from international body to national and regional users or local users. For the Oil Spill, the coastguard agencies are the main users while for the Water Quality, most of the users are in charge of

operational implementation of environmental policies (WFD, …) at national or regional level, including a high interest of EEA. 5.2. Validation and Users feedback A big effort is done to validate the MarCoast services. This task is undertaken by the MarCoast Validation Bureau who have issued a Validation Protocol that must be respected by all service providers. As part of this protocol, the providers shall send back a validation report related to their own activity. This validation report is cross-checked with the feedback report filled in by the user(s) who receive the service(s). The end users play a key role in this validation scheme as they provide means to perform the validation of the services: aerial flights are used to confirm detection of oil spills, in-situ network measurements to validate satellite-based information in the field of water quality. Today, validation reports are available for all services and show that, in general, user feedbacks are positive. The main findings confirm that

- All the services are compliant with the SLAs that have been signed

- There is a good communication between the user and the service provider

and highlight that the end users are mostly concerned by the continuity of the services - what will happen after the end of the GSEs - and by the qualification of the products. The main improvements expected by the users are an increase of the spatial resolution, the coverage and the information content of the products. 6. CONCLUSION

MarCoast project started in November 2006 and will end in November 2008. The first half of the project lifetime has allowed to get the involvement of numerous and various end-users, ranging from pan-European organisation to local entities. Each service activity relies on a Service Level Agreement, signed between the service provider who deliver the service and the user who receives it. MarCoast, through cross-cutting activities, tries to increase the visibility of the portfolio, to enlarge the users base, and to federate the key actors proposing marine and coastal downstream applications.