The Black Sea Monitoring and Forecasting Center Evolution 2025-2027

The Black Sea Monitoring and Forecasting Center (BLK-MFC) is a European reference service within the Copernicus Marine Service (CMEMS), providing routinely ocean analyses, 10-day forecasts, and multi-year reanalyses for the Black Sea basin. The BLK-MFC prediction system is based on state-of-the-art physical (including waves) and biogeochemical models and supports the monitoring and prediction of key ocean processes, as well as the production of Ocean Monitoring Indicators (OMIs). OMIs constitute a core element of the service, providing scientifically robust and policy-relevant information on the state and variability of the Black Sea, including climate change signals and extreme events. Recent OMIs address, among others, heat content, marine heatwaves, circulation, deoxygenation, sea level rise, and extremes.

This contribution presents the main evolutions of the BLK-MFC systems planned for the 2025–2027 period. The proposed roadmap focuses on progressive upgrades of the operational physical, wave, and biogeochemical components, ensuring service continuity while integrating recent scientific and technological advances. Developments for near-real-time (NRT) forecasting include improved data assimilation schemes, updated forcing datasets, exploitation of new satellite missions, and enhanced cross-component consistency.

Key scientific advances include an improved representation of upper-ocean variability, air–sea interactions, wave–current coupling, radiative transfer, and interactions with biogeochemical processes. Wave system upgrades strengthen the characterization of extreme sea states and coastal exposure, while biogeochemical developments enhance ecosystem monitoring, including primary production, water transparency, and deoxygenation, with acidification addressed in future releases. System performance is systematically assessed through the CMEMS Product Quality Dashboard.

Multi-year (MY) reanalyses are comprehensively renewed and extended to provide climate time series starting in 1950, reinforcing the basis for long-term variability and climate assessments. These reanalyses represent a key scientific asset, enabling the extension and consolidation of OMIs and supporting peer-reviewed research on long-term trends in the Black Sea,  such as marine heatwaves, ocean salt content, shelf hypoxia and deoxygenation, extreme wave conditions, and applications relevant to the Blue Economy.

Across all components, the BLK-MFC evolution places strong emphasis on harmonization of model grids, forcing, bathymetry, uncertainty assessment and metadata, compliance with the FAIR principles, and systematic validation  to ensure scientific robustness and user confidence in the products.

Overall, the 2025–2027 evolution strengthens the BLK-MFC’s capability to deliver reliable, scientifically advanced, and user-oriented ocean monitoring and forecasting services for the Black Sea, serving a broad and growing community of users supporting scientific research, operational decision-making, and climate-oriented applications in a region of high environmental and socio-economic relevance.