ICOOE, a Virtual Laboratory boosting the exploration and integration of coastal ocean observations along Europe

Coastal ocean areas are among the most complex and important marine regions of the World. Nowadays, a broad range of observations is collected in coastal ocean regions using many different systems. A panoply of numerical models is also being used to hindcast and forecast these areas. Much of this data is available to users through data aggregators and service providers, such as EMODnet or Copernicus Marine Systems.

The full potential of free access to this vast data pool is, however, frequently missed due to difficulties experienced by the users in handling the datasets, extracting the relevant information and combining different datasets in an integrated analysis. The ICOOE (Integration of Coastal Ocean Observations along Europe) VLab was developed and open to the community in the framework of the Blue Cloud 2026 project (EU Horizon Europe) to support the users in coping with these difficulties.

ICOOE proposes three complementary thematic services, providing a number of FAIR oriented tools and services that take full advantage of the Blue Cloud Virtual Research Environment and of globally accepted Ocean Best Practices and standards to explore key areas for the coastal ocean research and operational uses. The “Transboundary Transport and Connectivity” Thematic Service focus on the subinertial dynamics of coastal ocean areas. A dashboard environment allows the users to specify the geographical domain, time period and parameters of interest. The service identifies the available datasets for these choices and downloads and preprocess the datasets of interest. The user can then select a number of tools for exploration (e.g. basic statistics) or integration (e.g. pathways for transport) of the datasets. The pilot demonstrator of this thematic service accepts user domains located in the Iberian Margin global area and focuses on surface currents provided by HF radars and numerical models.

The “Extreme Events” Thematic Service explores the impacts of extreme storm events on the coastal ocean environment. Based on a user interface similar to the one describe above, this Thematic Service support users in the characterization of the conditions associated with 3 extreme storms that impacted the European coastal ocean areas, particularly their effects on the bottom sedimentary cover and on structures installed offshore.

The “Ocean Glider” Thematic Service aims to demonstrate the added value chain of glider missions from data acquisition to advanced products and visualizations for improved coastal information, integrating ocean state and variability derived from repeated glider transects Starting from input data provided by the user (raw data Slocum gliders or a OG1.0 standard dataset), the service offers a processing toolbox (based on Python Jupyter notebooks) designed to generate interpolated profiles on a regular grid along the glider monitoring line, based on the vertical and horizontal resolution of the raw data. It includes vertical sections of key parameters such as potential temperature, practical salinity, potential density, and geostrophic velocity. Additionally, an Advanced Data Viewer is used for enhanced data exploration and visualization.

This communication presents the basic capacities installed in the three thematic services implemented, providing use cases illustrating how they can support coastal ocean users.