Operational Oceanography is defined as the set of activities for the generation of products and services providing information on the marine and coastal environment. OO is designed to meet different societal, economical, scientific and other user needs. As defined by the EuroGOOS, there are two main pillars in OO services:
- The monitoring element, which focuses on the systematic and long-term routine measurements of oceans and atmosphere, and their rapid interpretation and dissemination.
- The prediction component, which uses ocean models to generate a variety of products that may be nowcasts (the most accurate description of the present ocean state provided by the analyses), forecasts (the future condition of the ocean for as far ahead as possible) or hindcasts (the most complete description of past states, provided by reanalysis).
Understanding the physical behavior of ocean and coastal areas provides an important guidance to manage issues related to anthropic impacts and resource exploitation activities. A wide variety of operational ocean models have been and are currently used to tackle different issues and to support various service purposes. These different types of ocean model applications, specific for each problem to be solved, are based on different computer codes and parameterizations. They resolve a range of spatial and temporal scales (with different model resolutions) using a miscellany of data sources (as forcing initial and boundary conditions) and can rely or not on data assimilation methods to integrate observations (Schiller et al., 2018).
Wind, waves and sea-level traditionally were the most important met-ocean parameters for maritime activities due to their implications for marine safety and impacts on operations and navigation conditions. Therefore, these parameters have been the most extensively monitored and forecasted since earlier times and their forecasting has frequently been the responsibility of meteorological services. The traditionally strong connection between waves and weather prediction is reinforced by the direct interaction between waves and winds, which makes the waves a special case with specific models coupled only with atmospheric models (see Chapter 10), resulting in a separated development of ocean and wave models. Nevertheless, in the last decade the gap between ocean and wave models is diminishing and they are being progressively integrated in more comprehensive operational ocean coupled systems (in some cases also coupling with the atmosphere).
The sea level is the other key variable that counts with a long tradition in operational services based on specific models. Sea level prediction services have supported very different human activities, mostly related to navigation in shallow waters being harbors, estuaries and other coastal areas impacted by tides and appreciably sub-tidal variability. Sea level forecasting of storm surge is a key element in coastal flooding warning systems. Originally, only astronomical tidal predictions were used in the sea level forecasting but progressively this approach was augmented by the use of storm surge models, which are based on single-layer homogeneous density barotropic ocean models but include also very detailed bathymetries with astronomical tidal forcing and a meteorological residual contribution (see Chapter 7). Currently, storm surge forecasting is also benefiting from the sea surface height products delivered by the available high-resolution 3D global and regional baroclinic models operated by different ocean forecasting services (Pérez et al., 2012).
A recent overview of the current European capacity in terms of operational modeling of marine and coastal systems (Capet et al., 2020) provides a comprehensive panorama of what are the essential ocean variables and phenomena of most interest in relation to their relevance for regional environmental issues and their impact on different economic sectors. An interesting output from the survey performed to underpin this study reveals that nowadays a vast majority of the identified OO forecast services operate hydrodynamic models (see info on them in Chapter 5), with waves and biogeochemical models (see Chapters 8 and 9) also represented but to a lesser extent. Other specific models, such as for particle drift prediction and sea ice (see Chapter 6), are scarcer in the operational landscape. The study also reveals how currents, salinity, temperature, and sea surface height are resolved for almost all operational models. Instead, basic variables of biogeochemistry (e.g., oxygen, nutrients, phyto and zooplankton biomasses, suspended, and organic matter) are much less represented in the ocean forecasting services. To date, marine safety, oil spills and sea level monitoring appear as the phenomena mostly addressed by European operational models (with more than 40 implementations). Storm surges, water quality, and eutrophication are well-considered at present (~ 15-25 implementations) and will benefit from an extended coverage in the coming years (~ +30-50 % within 5 years). Finally, it must be pointed out that harmful algal blooms, shoreline/bathymetry changes, and ocean acidification receive some attention but remain limited in their coverage.
Biogeochemical models have a greater complexity, as they involve many more state variables, parameters, uncertain processes, interactions and drivers, which means that they may not have yet reached the level of maturity required for accurate simulations and useful outputs; for these reasons their adoption in operational applications is presently limited. This also applies to the use of data assimilation in coastal operational application or sea ice coupled models, even though in the past decade substantial efforts have been dedicated to developing and improving comprehensive global and regional operational forecasting services. An example is the case of the service delivered by the marine component of the Copernicus Program of the European Union (Copernicus Marine Service, 2021a) which provides free, regular and systematic information on the state of the Blue (physical including waves), White (sea ice) and Green (biogeochemical) ocean at global and regional scales, on the basis of model applications with the appropriate complexity suitable for operational forecasting. Finally, it is to be noted that sustained availability of global and regional scale core products, such as the ones delivered by Copernicus Marine Service, has fostered the development of specific “downstream” services devoted to coastal forecasting, favoring synergies between different existing services (Sotillo et al., 2021).
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