Achievements towards an Operational Ocean Forecast Coastal Service in support of aquaculture management in the Ebro Delta (Spain – Mediterranean Sea).
BRIEF TEXT:
The e3HOPE service is aimed at enhancing water quality assessment in the Ebro Delta and supporting the environmental protection and management of aquaculture production in the area. This new operational service, based on a high-resolution coastal model system (which is evolving towards an advanced ocean-wave coupled set-up) with improved coastal freshwater inputs (using hydrological observations from the Ebro River and agriculture canals existing in the zone) will deliver coastal forecasts that can be accessed through a new end-user service platform (NAUI). This platform is co-designed with end-users to ease the use of new and existing operational monitoring and forecasting capabilities. It also makes coastal data more actionable and transferred into fit-for-purpose applications for a more sustainable aquaculture activity and biodiversity conservation.
INFORMATIONS:
The e3HOPE downstream coastal service, leaded by NOW Systems (Nologin, nowsystems.eu), relies upon a model application, based on ROMS model, developed by LIM/UPC (https://lim.upc.edu/en) and tested in the zone (with a coastal 70-m resolution domain) embedded in the NOW operational framework. The e3HOPE coastal service is completed with a targeted enhanced user visualization service layer, developed by NOW, and co-designed with IRTA (https://www.irta.cat/es/).
The NAUI web app to be developed for the Delta and Fangar Bay is a highly customizable tool that allows visualization of both met-ocean observations (including the continuous local monitoring routinely performed by IRTA at specific CTD stations) and the e3HOPE (and Copernicus) forecasts, making coastal data more actionable. This first NAUI deployment at the Ebro Delta, initially targeted for IRTA, is expected to be open to a wider local end-user community. To this aim, a first stakeholder meeting was held on December 2023, counting the participation of different potential end-users (from the Spanish State and Regional Catalan governments, the Ebro Delta Natural Park, L’Ampolla and Deltebre city councils, and the Ebro Delta Mussel producers Federation). These exchanges with stakeholders will certainly foster the uses of the e3HOPE operational coastal products across different communities.
The e3HOPE developments are being carried out in the framework of a project funded by Mercator Ocean International under the Copernicus Marine User EU Coastal Monitoring Pilot Demonstrations (https://marine.copernicus.eu/services/user-engagement).
Nologin / NOW Systems (
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