WORKPACKAGES
Short description of workpackages : WP1,
WP2, WP3, WP4,
WP5, WP6, WP7,
WP8, WP9, WP10,
WP11, WP12, WP13.
WP
1 : Coordination and management
Manage
the scientific,
technical, legal, administrative and financial co-ordination
of the project. This WP also includes communication (internal
and external to the project).
WP
2 : Remote sensing
The
remote sensing work package will ensure the availability in
real time of state-of-the-art remotely sensed global
products optimised for supporting operational oceanography.
Near real time and delayed mode products will be delivered
over 2004-2008. In parallel, processing systems will be
improved through R&D activities and consolidated to
become fully operational by 2008.
Specific
tasks concern:
WP
3 : In situ observing system
The
work package will ensure the availability of real time and
delayed-mode global and regional in - situ data and products
in the form required by the Mersea
modelling, data assimilation, and validation systems. Some
of the data will be specifically collected by the project,
but most will be recovered from existing observing systems.
Specific
tasks concern:
-
Profiling
floats
-
Time
series stations
-
Observations
from research vessels
-
Mediterranean
Sea observations
-
Technology
demonstrations for biogeochemical data
-
Data
management
WP
4 : Forcing fields
Numerical
weather forecasts are necessary to predict the state of the
ocean; they deliver forcing fields (wind, and heat and
moisture fluxes).
Analysis
of theses fields can be improved by combining them with
observations obtained by satellite. This
work package will:
-
determine
optimal ways to provide and validate surface forcing fields
as inputs to the MERSEA global ocean model,
-
implement
the operational near real-time access to the necessary ECMWF
outputs, as well as the processing resulting from the
R&D activities, to derive the optimal surface forcing
fields from the ECMWF outputs for MERSEA needs, by combining
them with satellite scaterrometer data.
WP
5 : Integrated system design and assessment
This
work package focuses on the design and assessment of the
Integrated System as a whole, to sharpen the specification
of the MERSEA Target System ie the overall capacity to
monitor and forecast Global Ocean and European seas to serve
end-user applications.
The
WP5
is
organised in four main tasks :
WP
6 : MERSEA
Information Management (MIM)
WP6 will build a system able to provide the necessary
data and information to the project and to users by building
a transparent system able to locate: which information is
available, where the information is managed, what data can
be accessed. The major problem to be faced by WP6 will be
the heterogeneity of the data sources. The approach followed
in MERSEA is that of a virtual (or mediated) integration of
information, where the user will pose a query, that will be
sent to appropriate sources (after necessary reformatting).
The results will be harmonised, fused and presented to the
user.
To achieve these goals, several tasks have been
identified :
-
Specification of the technical components
-
Develoment of the initial MIM
-
Implementation of the MIM system
-
Access to the regional components
-
Management of the MIM system
WP 7 : Modelling and assimilation
The general
objectives of this work-package are to perform research and
development on physical, ecosystem modelling and data
assimilation to serve the operational objective of MERSEA.
It will bring ad hoc scientific
innovations into the project and gather all the relevant
European capabilities to ensure that operational systems are
maintained at the most advanced level and thus benefit from
progress achieved in the research community, during the
project life-time and beyond.
The three main components reflect the
natural distribution of competence within the science
community :
-
physical models
-
biogeochemical models
-
biogeochemical models
-
biogeochemical models
-
data assimilation
WP
8 : Scientific evaluation of the Mersea
system
Christian Le Provost forcefully put forward the
necessity to evaluate rigorously the system output as an
indispensable activity within the project. He suddenly
passed away shortly before the official project start date.
His untimely death was a great loss to all who knew him as a
friend and a colleague. It is also a loss to the project,
which he contributed so much to define and shape up. The
tasks planned under his leadership have been re-organized
into the WP5 and WP7.
It has been decided not to renumber the work
packages, the missing WP 8 reminding us of his regretful
departure.
The activity of scientific evaluation was initiated
under the Mersea Strand 1 project, through the implementation of
metrics which have proven quite valuable.
WP
9 : Implementation and production
This work package is solely concerned with the ocean
assimilation systems at the core of Mersea
that will be developed into a coordinated set of systems for
Europe. They will produce a wide variety of real-time and
time-delayed outputs for the physical and biochemical state
variables of the marine ecosystem. The physical variables
will include sea surface height, sea ice thickness and
concentration, three dimensional temperature (T), salinity
(S) and velocity (u, v, w) components. The biochemical state
variables will include dissolved nitrates, phytoplankton
biomass (in terms of carbon content), and bacterial and
zooplankton biomass. Some systems will include additional
nutrients, oxygen and chlorophyll content.
the outputs
will include analyses, forecasts, hindcasts and re-analyses.
These systems will produce outputs for the global ocean and
the four seas surrounding Europe, namely, the Arctic, NE
Atlantic, Baltic and Mediterranean Seas.
WP
10 : Downscaling to regional systems
MERSEA will
develop the operational oceanographic systems for the
European regional seas to a common standard taking advantage
of the outcome of the global system in order to ensure that
users of marine services in the European regional seas get
“state of the art” quality of information.
A severe problem in regional forecasting activities
is the open boundaries towards the wider ocean in regional
models. To increase the performance and quality of regional
and coastal operational oceanographic services, it is
necessary to downscale the global fields to regional scale.
The objectives of WP10 therefore are to:
-
initiate a regional
community approach for assessing and utilizing the
capability of downscaling from the global to the regional
and coastal circulation scale using the MERSEA outputs and
data-assimilative models for local data sets.
-
verify improved quality of
high resolution operational oceanographic products for
regional seas.
WP
11 : Special focus experiments and applications
The objectives of this work package are to
develop and implement methods for interfacing Mersea
physical models and products with environmental oriented
applications that ultimately will be directed toward the
end-user community of environmental protection agencies and
meteorological agencies. Two topics of particular societal
and scientific interest have been selected for those
experiments : predicting biogeochemical variability in
European regional and shelf seas and forecasting the
ocean-atmosphere physical system on daily to seasonal time
scales.
The biogeochemical experiments are applied
to:
WP
12 : User oriented products
Operational oceanography is a
growing global business. Europe has the potential to
establish a Lead in this business by systematic integration
of resources and extensive collaboration between European
institutes and companies. There are documented needs for
many new operational monitoring and prediction products that
are likely to be derived from, and benefit from,
developments in a global ocean monitoring and forecasting.
The general
objective of this work package is to further enhance a range
of operational ocean prediction products by introducing the
information obtained from the forecasts provided by the
global and regional Mersea
integrated systems. The work will bear on development and
demonstration of these products for industrial, governmental
and other potential users and clients. It is intended to
demonstrate the benefits of operational ocean forecast
products and thereby to develop a market for such
products, and to establish services which improve security,
safety and cost effectiveness of offshore activities.
Specific applications concern:
-
high resolution ocean forecasting for deep water oil
exploration and production
-
improved wave forecasts and ship routing
-
oil spill fate prediction
WP13 : Overall assessment
The final performance of MERSEA, including its
service and delivery of products and their relevance in the
context of GMES shall be judged and assessed according to
the total system integration and operational capacity,
education and training, and public outreach. Moreover the
assessment will propose a long term vision of the
requirements for potential research and technology
breakthroughs. It will analyse the operational issues beyond
2008, including consideration and possible scenarios for a
sustainable organisation which shall ensure evolution of the
system in the long term.
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