OceanUCA: towards the adaptation and consolidation of an Operational Oceanographic and Atmospheric System to improve the observation and forecasting of coastal physical processes in Andalusia

The OceanUCA project* focuses on the development of an operational platform to integrate and update already existing operational tools (such as the OceanMap UCA system developed by the group in the framework of previous projects), including new observational systems and higher-resolution numerical model products.

The methodology of the project aims to improve and adapt the computational resources to respond to the current societal needs and to the higher computational time demand of the new models. This is mainly motivated by the growing spatiotemporal resolution of the models used to effectively respond to specific environmental coastal problems (e.g., oil spills, wrecks, marine and atmospheric heat waves, extreme events tracking, etc.). OceanUCA will be based on tools generated from observational data and numerical model outputs (both atmospheric and hydrodynamic), specifically designed and configured to reach their maximum resolution on the coast of Andalusia (Southern Spain). Besides, the new operational platform OceanUCA will be coordinated with other Spanish and European operational oceanographic services.

The ultimate aim of the project will serve to detect specific effects associated with climate change, to enhance the environmental protection of the area, to facilitate the conservation of natural resources, to develop early-warning products, to improve the short, medium, and long-term forecasts, and to help using adequately the set of ecosystem services that the coastal environment offers. Besides, we hope the new platform will help the decision-making from institutions and third parties through the real-time (and forecast) monitoring of marine and atmospheric processes on the coast of Andalusia.

In this work, we will show details about the platform, including overviews of the hydrodynamic and atmospheric models used and the associated observations, that will be extended in the frame of related projects currently developed.

* OceanUCA is a project recently funded by the 2023 call for Marine Sciences I+D+i projects in the frame of: “Plan Complementario de Ciencias Marinas of Junta de Andalucía” and “Plan de Recuperación, Transformación y Resiliencia” (NextGenerationEU funding).