Operational Ocean Forecasting Systems (OOFS) are amongst the main and more powerful tools to build the bridge between marine science and society needs, with a consistent and state-of-the-art digital depiction of the ocean environmental state. It took less than two decades to OOFS to emerge from science, gain realism and operational maturity, and convince users of their value; and this is not by chance if international cooperation was identified from the very first day as a key condition for success, being today the natural playground for the development of the OOFS capacity.
Given its importance in the socio-economic and environmental context, outlined in chapter 1, the role of OOFS is gaining relevance with time, both locally through expert services, and globally through international coordinated actions. This importance is being additionally reinforced by the increasing quality of the forecast services and the international cooperation in data exchange and creation of standards, vital tools for ocean forecasting.
The three pillars of the Global Ocean Observing System strategy (GOOS, 2020) can help to briefly describe this relevance. These are applications, climate, and ocean health:
- Applications (blue economy): Ocean forecasting is gaining worldwide relevance in creating applied solutions for final users to contribute to a virtuous blue economy. Both public institutions and private companies are taking active steps to implement the so-called “value chain”, that transforms ocean observation into information to be employed by end user applications. This is invigorating economic activities, creating jobs, and providing solutions for environmental problems. Chapter 11 provides detailed insight on this particular and presents several relevant applications. Other outstanding set of examples can be found at 🔗1 .
- Climate: Climate change is threatening our ocean and, very particularly, our coasts. For example, sea level rise will produce an increase of coastal erosion and inundation events. And the earth climate cannot be explained without a fair understanding of the ocean climate. The study of climate change scenarios with numerical models is our best tool to assess the hazards, one of the key elements of risk analyses, together with vulnerability and exposure. Ocean global reanalyses produced by ocean forecasting centres as reference simulations for the past decades are key elements in this domain. These simulations, together with scenario projections, allow us to create climate change impact studies that are the main source of information to design mitigation and adaptation strategies. On shorter time scales, dynamic risk reduction activities are vital for maintaining activities in a changing environment. In this sense, the OOFS will become even more relevant, as the number of extreme events increases. Examples of the ocean climate monitoring by OOFS can be found here, with indicators (🔗2 ) and annual expert reports on the ocean climate (🔗3 ): they are amongst the first OOFS products used by policy makers.
- Ocean health: Human activity is impacting ocean health, increasing its temperature and its acidification. This problem is having very visible and dramatic consequences, such as coral bleaching, increments of harmful algal blooms, migration of species and jellyfish proliferation. Ocean forecasting is a key tool to understand the internal dynamics of these processes and, therefore, provide solutions based on knowledge. Additionally, OOFS are providing vital information for strategic action areas to improve sustainability for future generations; food, energy, tourism transport, energy, and seabed mining, as described by the high-level panel for a sustainable ocean economy (🔗4 ). All these activities are benefiting from the accurate forecasts that our present-day systems are providing.
The ocean dynamics is of course not limited by our national boundaries, so international cooperation is necessary when dealing with ocean forecasting. But the other reason for imposing international cooperation to ocean forecasting centres, as a mandatory framework for action, is the need to build a strong community voice supporting the policy effort towards a sustainable ocean. With the Ocean relevance increasingly present on international political agendas (see the UN Agenda 2030, the EU Green Deal, and many other initiatives), knowledge derived from OOFS is today essential, and the only way to achieve this is by action on a global framework. Even when OOFS implementation and ocean applications are local, they contribute to a global challenge. On the local scale they bridge the gap between ocean observations and applications and are active players of a prosperous Blue Economy. But their impact is global, by supporting assessment studies and contributing to an improved local sustainability policy that impacts, at the end, the global ocean.
Due to the previous reasons, the international structuration of the OOFS community is an essential condition for a sustainable development of the ocean. Ocean Forecasting is now a recognized player of international ocean governance fora such as the UN ocean initiatives where ocean policies are discussed. Remarkably, ocean forecasting has been identified by the UN as a key contributor for its 14th sustainable development goal “life below water”.
What has been changed is this :
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