In case of maritime pollution, man-overboard, or objects adrift at sea, national maritime authorities of the 9 countries bordering the European North West Continental Shelf (NWS) rely on drift model simulations in order to better understand the situation at stake and plan the best response strategy. So far, the drift forecast services are mainly managed at national levels with almost no integration at the transnational level. Designed as a support service to the national drift forecasting services, NOOS-Drift has the ambition to change this paradigm. NOOS-Drift is a distributed transnational multi-model ensemble system to assess and improve drift forecast accuracy in the European North West Continental Shelf. Developed as a one-stop-shop web service, the service allows registered users (national drift model operators or trained maritime authorities) to submit on-demand drift simulation requests to be run by all the national drift forecasting services connected to NOOS-Drift. Within 15 minutes after activation, the NOOS-Drift users shall get access to the drift simulation results of the individual ensemble members, as well as the results of a multi-models joint analysis assessing the ensemble spread and delineating risk areas to locate possible maritime pollution. This operation of such a distributed multi-models service is to our knowledge a world premiere. In this communication, we will present the technical and scientific developments that had to be done to make this service possible, including: - a robust, secure and latency-free communication system that coordinates the execution of the different national models - a strategy to build the multi-model ensemble - a definition of drift forecast accuracy - the joint multi-model analysis tools - the standard file formats and visualisation means. Finally we will illustrate on an example how the NOOS-Drift service could change the decision making process.
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RBINS Staff Publications 2020
The North Sea is an epeiric sea on the European continental shelf, which connects to the Atlantic Ocean through the English Channel in the South and the Norwegian Sea in the North. It hosts key north European shipping lanes, and it is a major fishery and a rich source of energy resources, including wind, wave and solar power. Here we present a nested hydrodynamics model that is calibrated against in situ data for the year 2009, and validated for the years 2010, 2011 and 2015, which present a large range of contrasting North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) indices. Our results are openly available and provide 10+ years of hydrodynamics data (sea surface elevation, sea water velocity, potential temperature and salinity) with a resolution of 30 arcseconds in the Southern Bight of the North Sea, and 2 arcminutes elsewhere. With our model and resulting dataset, we aim at supporting marine research and policy in a highly, anthropogenically impacted system, allowing stakeholders to take informed decisions to sustainably manage its valuable resources.
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RBINS Staff Publications 2024
