Advancing the European Ocean Observing Community: integrating efforts to address gaps and enhance readiness for essential ocean phenomena

European Ocean Observers and scientists bring together a diverse array of ocean and coastal observers and modelers that provide information to meet national and cross-border needs for predicting and managing Europe’s Seas. While national efforts are essential, effective coordination across nations and other actors is required to overcome fragmentation and maximize benefits. This integration is vital for gaining insights into climate change impacts on European waters, as well as for cross-border marine resource management. Our work identifies the current state of European ocean observing activities, highlighting key gaps that hinder its effectiveness, including issues with spatial and temporal observation coverage, data integration and accessibility, technological barriers, uncertainties in projections, and engagement and communication challenges. To address these, detailed recommendations are offered, extending beyond academic interest and carrying significant implications for climate change mitigation, marine resource management, ecosystem resilience, disaster preparedness, economic gains, and broader scientific advancement. To further enhance the capabilities, we introduce a scoring approach to evaluate the readiness in observing and forecasting essential ocean phenomena. Applied at both European and regional or national levels, this transformative methodology provides a means to scrutinize the capability of the community. While notable readiness levels exist for certain phenomena, findings reveal that 83% of the assessed elements remain at developing stages, ranging from “Idea” to “Trial” readiness levels. Deficiencies are most prominent in coordination, observational processes, and data management outputs. By regularly adopting such a scoring framework, progress can be tracked, guiding strategic investments and support to build a resilient, future-ready European Ocean Observing and Forecasting communities, ultimately benefiting society and supporting sustainable ocean initiatives.