The Mediterranean Monitoring and Forecasting Center (MED MFC) of the Copernicus Marine Service provides regular and systematic reference information on the physical and biogeochemical state for the Mediterranean Sea. MED MFC develops, implements and operationally delivers analysis, forecast as well as reanalysis reconstructions of the essential ocean variables in the Mediterranean Sea.
It enables marine policy implementation, supports Blue Growth and scientific innovation. Copernicus Marine Service is an open and free of charge service, compliant with EU regulations such as INSPIRE and the Delegated Regulation on Copernicus data and information policy.
General aims
This contract is issued within the Copernicus2 Marine Service phase of 2025 to 2028, for the provision of ocean analysis and forecasting products to be integrated into the Copernicus Marine Service. In particular the service will provide real-time and delayed-time physical, wave and biogeochemical products for the Mediterranean Sea.
The MED MFC is composed of three main components: Med-PHY, for the physical products; Med-BGC for the biogeochemical products and Med-WAV for the wave products.
The MED MFC Leader is Emanuela Clementi and the Deputy Leader is Francesco Maicu, both from CMCC.
CMCC role
CMCC Foundation is the representative Member of the Consortium and is also responsible for the MED MFC service desk, for the Med-PHY Production Unit and its Archiving Unit, and for the Med-WAV Back Up Unit.
Activities
Main activities of the whole Mediterranean Sea service are grouped into:
• Systems Evolution and implementation
• Data production and operations for near real time and multi-year products
• Product Quality
• Service Desk
• Cross cutting activities: ocean state report (OSR) and ocean monitoring indicators (OMI), working groups
• Management and Reporting
Expected results
The Mediterranean Sea MFC provides:
• Analysis for the previous 2 years
• Forecast for the following 10 days
• Reanalysis initialized in 1987 for the physics, 1999 for the biogeochemistry and 1985 for the waves
• Reanalysis-Interim initialized with the last available Reanalysis and extended every month of ocean physical, biogeochemical and wave variables for the whole Mediterranean Sea.
In particular CMCC will contribute with the development and implementation of upgraded systems in order to provide improved quality of the Mediterranean Sea forecast and reanalysis physical variables. The core of the modeling system is based on a coupled hydrodynamical-wave (NEMO-WW3) modeling system including tides assimilating available observations in the basin (in-situ temperature and salinity vertical profiles, sea level anomaly altimeter data) by means of the OceanVar assimilation scheme developed at CMCC, with a resolution of about 4 km and 141 vertical levels.
The analysis and forecasting system will progressively evolve to account for: a) inclusion of daily lateral open boundary conditions from the Unstructured Turkish Straits System developed at CMCC; b) improved vertical dynamics representation; c) upgrade of the numerical models; d) improved wave-current coupling, e) improved river runoff representation by using the CMCC Estuarine Box Model; f) the upgrades of CMCC OceanVar scheme to accommodate assimilation of new observations and new parameterizations; g) improved initial conditions for the forecasting cycle.
Moreover the production of new reanalysis to address the climate monitoring and ocean variability description will be delivered starting from 1980, aligned as much as possible with the numerical implementation of the analysis and forecasting system.
Partners
Istituto Nazionale di Oceanografia e di Geofisica Sperimentale – OGS, Italy
Hellenic Centre for Marine Research – HCMR, Greece
CINECA, Italy