Copernicus Marine Service: Coastal Extension

Over the period 2021-2028, the Copernicus Marine Service will provide a continuity of service with incremental evolutions of products and services. Yet, major evolutions are proposed to better answer user needs, to keep the service at the state-of-the-art and to meet the new ocean monitoring and forecasting challenges required by European policies and users. In this context, a priority evolution for the Copernicus Marine Service to be implemented by 2028 is a major extension of the service towards the coastal ocean.

In this presentation, an overview of the proposed evolutions of the Copernicus Marine Service towards the coastal ocean will be provided.

Incremental evolutions are planned within the Copernicus Marine Service core service to better address coastal zones, including an improved representation of processes and forcings relevant for coastal zones, enhanced assimilation of observations over continental shelves, improved algorithms to provide satellite derived information on the ocean state and winds in the coastal zone, etc.

In addition, new short, mid- and long-term activities are scheduled to develop new services. 

In the short-term, a Copernicus Coastal Thematic Hub will be implemented to gather in a single platform and access point the ensemble of information generated by several Copernicus Services on coastal zones. In addition, the Copernicus Marine Service will develop an improved coastal zone monitoring with new pan-European satellite-based products.

In the mid-term, a co-design and co-production of marine information will be developed between Copernicus Marine and EU Member States. In that regard, a selection of coastal systems operated by Member States will be coupled to Copernicus Marine monitoring and forecasting operational systems.

In the long-term, climate projections of the marine environment (physics, biogeochemistry, marine ecosystems) will be developed for the 21^st century at basin scale. This long-term evolution is building on precursor R&D European projects and aims at developing regional to local ocean climate services to support policy implementation, including for coastal zones.