This project will generate a Polycentric infrastructure, which will produce forecasts of oceanic currents and wave climate necessary for maritime safety and for simulation an mitigation of marine pollution, generated at sea (spills) or along the shore line (wastewater discharges). Those forecasts are a major product of this project. Technological developments required for the forecasting tool are other relevant products from this project.

A technologic platform of data exchange between operational systems

In the short term a system will be implemented for providing large scale model results to be used as open boundary conditions for regional and local circulation forecasting in the Iberian coasts and Azores area. This system will also integrate weather and wave forecasts for the same areas of the circulation models.

The forecasts produce by each partner will be catalogued in a meta-database using the ISO19115 metadata standard for simplifying international data exchange. This data base will be the link between the services run by each user and the numerical forecasts and will include the information that characterizes each result (e.g. period, horizontal resolution, parameters forecast, spatial window).

The data exchange system will be designed to integrate easily results from other high resolution circulation, weather and wave forecast systems for other Atlantic costal regions (e.g. Cadiz Gulf, French Atlantic Coast, England and Ireland) and insular regions (e.g. Canaries an Madeira). The idea is to stimulate the cooperation with other institutions promoting the scalability of this project and to enhance the validation of results and the resolution in more geographical areas, other then the Tagus, Ria de Vigo and Azores.

Regional and Local forecast services focus on specific sea activities

Results from the forecasts at regional and local scales will be made available to the end-users and to the general public though a webpage. These services will help the end user to plan its activities, taking into consideration the sea and atmospheric conditions, minimizing the uncertainty in its activities and thus maximizing marine security and decreasing costs.

In the long term the idea is to forecast not only physical properties but also biogeochemical ones (e.g. chlorophyll, phytoplankton biomass, nutrients, oxygen), which will be a very important information for fisheries and for management of coastal areas. Biogeochemical parameter forecasts will also be very useful for the identification and monitoring of Harmful Algal Blooms and thus for aquaculture activities.

Multi-platform bidirectional interface optimized for each sea activity

At the end of the project a list of services chosen by the consortium together with the consulting board will be available allowing him to simulate the displacement of passive properties in the sea. e.g. oil spills management, tracking of large objects lost in sea and its potential consequences for specific area (e.g. for bathing waters).

In the short term the user interface will be optimized to give access to the system via web in standard laptop or desktop computers. Since the system is completely web-enabled, it can be easily adapted to other platforms like handheld PDAs or Smartphones, in a second phase. On this way the service can be accessed from any web-enabled device using standard browsers has user interface

In the framework of the project the interface will give access mainly to data produced by the polycentric infrastructure. In the long term the interface will allow the user to have optimized access also to sea data platforms like the SeaDataNet (http://www.seadatanet.org/) a Pan-European infrastructure for Ocean & Marine Data Management.