The Client
The Copernicus Marine Service. It is funded by the European Commission (EC) and implemented by Mercator Ocean International.
The Challenge
The Copernicus Marine OC-TAC is an oceanographic operational service aimed to the integration and timely delivery of a set of the Essential Ocean Variables (EOVs) that can be retrieved from Ocean Colour radiometry.
The objective is to add value to standard products delivered by space agencies, providing global and regional high-level merged OC-TAC products.
NOW Systems contribution is focused both on OC-TAC R&D activities, developing new products, and on the validation and quality assessment. Users include scientific and operational oceanography communities, commercial providers or public agencies interested in water quality monitoring and/or exploitation of marine resources.
Partners
The OC-TAC partnership coodinated by CNR (Italy) is also composed by ACRI-ST (France), Royal Belgium Institude of Natural Sciences (Belgium), Brockman-Consulting (Germany), Plymouth Marine Laboratory (PML, UK), AEQUORA LDA (Portugal) and LaserRomae (Italy).
The Results
NOW Systems contributes to all the tasks (leaded by CNR as OC-TAC Production Centre) for the implementation of the products for four regions: i.e., Mediterranean Sea, Black Sea, Baltic Sea and Arctic Ocean. In addition to the validation and quality assessment of existing and new datasets, activities also include development of new algorithms or data exploitation for water quality or coastal applications.
The validation of the OC-TAC products, which is based on the pairwise comparison against in situ reference observations, is a key activity required for all the datasets included in the catalogue: reflectance, plankton (chlorophyll-a, phytoplankton size classes, phytoplankton functional types), transparency, primary production and optics. Some of these validation activities carried out in collaboration with other Projects, such as ESA HYPERNET-POP or TARA. We are also involved in some methodological improvements, like uncertainty analysis or a better optical interpretation of the results
Regarding planed service evolutions, we are involved in the development and implementation of the new chlorophyll algorithm for the Black Sea. The new approach is intended to improve the chlorophyll-a retrievals on coastal areas characterized by moderate to highly turbid waters. The new method is expected to combine the optical water type classification implemented in European Projects (H2020 DOORS) with OC-TAC merging schemes
A major update for the Baltic Sea is also planned. Retrieval of reliable ocean colour variables in this basin, characterized by highly absorbing waters, is a challenging task
Collaboration with Space Agencies and data providers for the assessment of new satellite products in preparation for its future integration within the Copernicus Marine OC-TAC catalogue (i.e., the new EUMETSAT OLCI collection 4, or new hyperspectral instruments as NASA PACE OCI)