EUMETSAT significant contribution to CMEMS

EUMETSAT, the European Organisation for Meteorological Satellites, is expanding its scope beyond supporting meteorology, environment and climate monitoring, to oceanography. To this end, EUMETSAT operates satellites and data processing systems, to provide services which are of high value to ocean monitoring and prediction, especially to the Copernicus Marine Environment Monitoring Service (CMEMS). Key sea and sea ice parameters operated by EUMETSAT secretariat and Ocean and Sea Ice Satellite Application Facilities for different timeliness are either redistributed by CMEMS or used to improve their user services.

EUMETSAT's current geostationary and polar Programmes, as well as the European Copernicus Programme of which EUMETSAT is a delegated entity, provide operational observations of the sea and sea ice.

The Meteosat geostationnary Programme (MSG and soon MTG) provides sea surface temperature and radiative fluxes from the SEVIRI instrument, and in the future from the FCI and IRS instruments. It is complemented by the polar Programmes EPS, and soon EPS-SG, which provide additional parameters of sea ice, sea surface temperature, sea surface radiative fluxes and wind vectors from AVHRR, ASCAT, IASI and in the future from MetImage, SCA, MWI,IASI-NG.

The Jason-CS Programme and the Copernicus Agreement with the EU have entrusted EUMETSAT with operation of the Copernicus Sentinel-3 and Jason-CS/Sentinel-6 satellites, and thus added ocean colour information and further surface topography and surface temperature products.

The Copernicus Sentinel-3 mission is today flying in constellation, jointly operated by ESA and EUMETSAT. Each Sentinel-3 satellite carries OLCI, SLSTR and topography payload, providing a wide range of operational products related to ocean topography (and related parameters), sea and sea ice surface temperature and ocean colour.

Sentinel-6 is a collaborative Copernicus mission implemented and co-funded by the European Commission, the European Space Agency, EUMETSAT, and the US, through NASA and NOAA.  The two successive Copernicus Sentinel-6 satellites (A and B), launched in November 2020 and to be launched 2025, will fly the same specific non-sun-synchronous low-Earth orbit as the series of European/US TOPEX/Poseidon and Jason satellites to continue the high-precision ocean altimetry mission delivered for more than 30 years.

In this presentation, we will present in details EUMETSAT contributions to observations used by CMEMS, the recent innovations in the EUMETSAT stream of marine satellite data, and planned evolutions responding to CMEMS needs for ocean monitoring and prediction.