MARCOAST: The Water quality services two years of experiences and achievements

Abstract

MarCoast (Marine und Coastal Environmental Information Services)is the GMES Service Element Project (2005-2008) addressing the marine environment and is funded by the European Space Agency. MarCoast is delivering on a regular basis a wide array of products to support the monitoring of European Seas in terms of water quality, alga bloom and oil spill to specific users directly involved in the project. The Water Quality services is pan-European and is addressed to users in charge of operational implementation of international, EU and national environmental policies, such as regional seas conventions (e.g. OSPAR, Barcelona Conventions), the EU Water Framework Directive, ICZM recommendations, etc. MarCoast water quality monitoring and algae blooms monitoring and alert rely – beside SST from AVHRR and AATSR – on data provided by two ocean colour instruments: MERIS onboard ENVISAT and MODIS on Aqua. Raw ocean colour are processed using case 1 and case 2 algorithms and delivered with a resolution of 1 km. MERIS FR data (300 m) are also processed for some demonstration areas. The main challenges of MarCoast are the validation of EO data using in situ data provided by the user, an attempt of regionalisation of the products and the building-up of tailored services for different typologies of users representing a Pan-European effort to build upon for the GMES Marine downstream services.