The goal of ECOOP is to build up a sustainable pan-European capacity in providing timely, quality assured marine service (including data, information products, knowledge and scientific advices) in European coastal-shelf seas.
The MERSEA Integrated Project has looked at the provision of ocean basin scale forecast model outputs to a variety of intermediate users. The ECOOP Integrated Project will take the products made available by MERSEA and fine tune them to meet a variety of applications in European Coastal Seas such as:
- Ecosystem models
- HAB warning systems
- Oil spill and contaminant dispersion and forecast studies
- Maritime ship routing applications
The overall goal of ECOOP is to: Consolidate, integrate and further develop existing European coastal and regional seas operational observing and forecasting systems into an integrated pan- European system targeted at detecting environmental and climate changes, predicting their evolution, producing timely and quality assured forecasts, providing marine information services (including data, information products, knowledge and scientific advices) and facilitate decision support needs.
This is to be attained through the following activities:
- Integrate existing coastal and regional sea observing (remote sensing, in-situ) networks into a pan-European observing system.
- Integrate existing coastal and regional sea forecasting systems into a pan-European forecasting system and assimilate pan-European observation database into the system.
- Assess the quality of pan-European observing and forecasting system.
- Advance key technologies for the current and next generation pan-European observing and forecasting system.
- Develop and generate value-added products for detecting environment and climate change signals.
- Integrate and implement a pan-European Marine Information System of Systems (EuroMISS) for general end user needs.
- Develop methodology and demonstrate an European Decision Support System for coastal and regional seas (EuroDeSS) that responds to the needs from targeted end users, as emphasized in the GEOSS and GMES initiatives.
- Carry out technology transfer both in Europe and at intercontinental level; establish education and training capacities to meet the need for ocean forecasters.
ECOOP will achieve its goals by implementing an integration of observations and modelling into a pan-European marine information system of systems (EuroMISS) and design of a European decision support system (EuroDESS) for coastal and regional seas. | 