Copernicus for Marine Environment Monitoring -

Project results are expected to contribute to the following expected outcomes:

• Enhanced quality and efficiency of the Copernicus Marine Environment Monitoring Service to respond to (a) policy and/or user requirements (b) technological developments implementing the space regulation (c) complementing the challenges targeted by the Horizon Europe Mission on “Healthy oceans, seas, coastal and inland waters” and can also contribute to the initiative United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development.
• Development of efficient and reliable new products chains, calling for innovation in data fusion, data processing and data visualisation essential for the service to handle more high-volume satellite data sets and product sets. The baseline is to preserve continuity of what has been achieved while keeping the service modern and attractive.
• Development of new algorithms and processing chains preparing the use of the new types of space observation data (being from new Sentinels or other contributing missions) in order to allow development of new products or the improvement of existing products.

The coastal zones have tremendous social, economic and biological value but are exposed to a high level of pressure due to climate change and human activities (e.g. regional sea level rise due to ice melting, coastal erosion, coastal floods, pollution, etc.). It is essential to advance Copernicus solutions to answer policy (e.g. WFD, MSFD, MSP, CFP, Flood Directive, Arctic Policy, Green Deal) needs to better manage and protect the coastal zone, to ensure the development of a sustainable blue economy (e.g. tourism, energy extraction, fisheries, offshore operations, industrial port areas, cities growth) , and to build resilience to climate change, human activities being potentially exposed and vulnerable to many hazards of natural or anthropic origins, including storm surges, flooding, acidification, ice melting, and degradation of ecosystems.

The objective is to implement an advanced and seamless monitoring and forecasting of the ocean from global/regional to coastal scales representative of high-resolution and high-dynamics phenomena (physics, biogeochemistry) to better constrain the coastal applications and models developed at national to local level for several applications. As such the project should encourage a co-production between the EU Copernicus Marine Service global/regional service and Member State and Copernicus Participating States coastal services using digital innovation and facilities (including using Copernicus DIAS if appropriate). This requires:

• The development of improved pan-European satellite coastal observation retrievals (e.g. sea level, sea surface temperature, ocean colour, bathymetry, shoreline position, winds, waves, ice changes.), notably derived from Sentinel data, and an improved access and processing of in-situ data in the coastal zone.
• The development of improved inputs of freshwater flows and associated river inputs of particulate and dissolved organic and mineral matter and the development of standardized methods to couple hydrological models (for river run-offs) with Copernicus Marine and coastal ocean models.
• The development of improved coupling techniques between Copernicus Marine observations and modelling systems and downstream coastal observation and modelling systems operated by Member States and Copernicus Participating States including an impact assessment for key coastal applications (e.g. marine hazards, offshore operations, fishery and aquaculture, pollution) and EU policies (e.g. MSFD, WFP, MSP, CFP, Green Deal).

New technological tools should be considered and innovative solutions should be proposed for better data exploitation, processing and distribution, e.g. move to cloud and HPC computing, distributed computing, Artificial Intelligence and machine learning (e.g. for automatic feature recognition), ensemble modelling, model coupling & nesting.

Proposals are expected to provide tangible results (new or improved products or service elements) for the Copernicus Marine service. The proposed research and development should be modular and scalable and should support the automatization of different processes orchestration. The transfer of research results to possible operations should receive active attention during the project to strengthen the technical readiness for an operational deployment in the future (e.g. system element targeting TRL 5-6). Appropriate interaction with the relevant Entrusted Entity of the Copernicus services, the conditions for making available, for re-using and exploiting the results (including IPR) by the said entities must be addressed during the project implementation. Software should be open licensed.

The activities of the project should also contribute to the objectives set by the Group on Earth Observation and outcomes and relevant results of the project should be promoted also at international level through the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS).

The project could contribute to the objectives set by the DestinE initiative and to the Digital Twin Ocean under development following the H2020 Green Deal call and Horizon Europe calls.

Applicants are advised to consult information on the Copernicus programme in general at https://www.copernicus.eu/en and further details on the topic in the Guidance document.

In this topic the integration of the gender dimension (sex and gender analysis) in research and innovation content is not a mandatory requirement.

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