Forecasting systems, data visualization systems, web applications, and much more: on World Oceans Day 2023, a selection of the main services offered by CMCC to the scientific community and society to know more about the ocean and how to approach it. 

“Planet Ocean: tides are changing” is the title of the 2023 World Oceans Day: despite humanity’s utter reliance on the ocean, only a small portion of it has been explored and it receives only a fragment of our attention and resources. For this reason the UN recalls that “it is time to put the ocean first”.

Understanding the ocean requires the involvement of a variety of scientific disciplines, the use of advanced technologies to provide forecasts, and the study of marine and coastal ecosystems. The growing ability of the CMCC to provide information on the ocean and make it available for the scientific community and other stakeholders takes different forms. From interactive maps to data visualization systems, from web applications to the development of ocean forecasting systems, the CMCC research provides useful tools for a deeper understanding of the sea in many ways, besides a broad production of peer reviewed scientific publications on the topic.

The applications developed include systems for optimizing nautical routes in any meteo-marine condition in the Mediterranean sea, such as VISIR: an open-source numerical model for computing safe and efficient routes, which capacity to reduce carbon emissions for ferries or make sailboat routes faster thanks to both wind and currents was recently demonstrated in two operational services developed by CMCC. Another operational service is WITOIL, enabling it to predict the behavior of an oil slick and its possible beaching following a spill which might occur anywhere in the global ocean. The new version of WITOIL makes use of several ocean models, allowing for even more realistic predictions than previous versions. The computational speed allows CMCC to timely provide a concrete support for emergency interventions in order to limit environmental and economic damage, as demonstrated on the occasion of the oil spill in Syria in 2021, of the Mauritius oil spill in 2020 and, more recently, in the “Oil Spill” exercise carried out in collaboration with the Italian Civil Protection Section of the Apulia Region.

The CMCC develops and implements ocean forecasting systems at different geographical scales, including global, regional, and coastal, available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

The Global Ocean Forecast System (GOFS16) is an operational ocean analysis and forecast system that runs daily at the Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change since early 2017. GOFS16 produces 7-day forecasts of the state of the global ocean and sea ice: ocean temperatures, salinities and currents, as well as sea ice thickness and concentration.

The Mediterranean Analysis and Forecasting System (MedFS) is a numerical ocean prediction system that produces analysis and short term (10 days) forecasts for the entire Mediterranean Sea and its Atlantic ocean adjacent area. It became operational in the late 90’s and since 2015 is part of the Copernicus Marine Service. MedFS is developed and operationally maintained at CMCC since 2018 providing regular and systematic information about the physical state of the Mediterranean Sea.

The Black Sea analysis and Forecasting System (BSFS, EAS4.1 version) is the operational system that provides regular and systematic information about the physical state of the Black Sea region, including: analysis, 10 days forecasts and reanalysis, describing waves, currents, temperature, salinity, sea level and biogeochemistry. It is developed by CMCC, which is responsible for the Black Sea Physics Production Unit as part of the Black Sea Monitoring and Forecasting Centre in the framework of the Copernicus Marine Environment and Monitoring Service (CMEMS).

To know more about the CMCC research on the ocean, have a look at the work developed by the Ocean modeling and Data Assimilation and Ocean Predictions and Applications Divisions.

The full list of CMCC Ocean Forecasting systems is available here.

For a more detailed description and to understand who their end-users are, read “Predicting the Ocean: improved forecast and new insights for the Mediterranean and Black Seas”

All CMCC Ocean Data Visualization Systems are collected on this page.

The full list of CMCC’s peer-reviewed scientific publications on the topic “Ocean” are available here.