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GLORAN – COPERNICUS MARINE – PRODUCTION PROVISION AND ANALYSIS OF REANALYSIS PRODUCTS FOR THE GLOBAL OCEAN

This is a supply of oceanic reanalysis products that will be integrated into the Copernicus marine service. The service will provide at different times and on a monthly basis,  physical (ocean and sea ice) and biological (micronekton) model products for the global ocean. The quality of these reanalyses will be analyzed and the relative performances compared in the context of the developing indicators of ocean variability.  

GoNEXUS – Innovative tools and solutions for governing the water-energy-food-ecosystems NEXUS under global change

GoNEXUS aims to develop a framework for designing and assessing innovative solutions for an efficient and sustainable coordinated governance of the water-energy-food-ecosystems (WEFE) nexus. Solutions will combine policy changes and soft path options with technical and infrastructure measures for a more resilient future. To achieve this objective, the project will build a powerful model toolbox and creative participatory Nexus Dialogues. The model toolbox will include forefront global/continental and river basin models, innovatively establishing a functional link between them. At global and continental scales, the toolbox will include the individual WEFE element models CAPRI (food, agri-environment), LISFLOOD-EPIC and PCR-GLOBWB (water), PRIMES and PROMETHEUS (energy), GLOBIO (environment), and GEM-E3 (macroeconomics), some of them used in EU policies. River basin models will include nested strategic WEFE management models (including behavioral modelling) and hydrological simulation models to expand the analysis of resilience at basin scale, including impacts on ecosystems. Nexus Dialogues will co- design scenarios, models, and solutions for a joint governance of the WEFE nexus. The solutions will be evaluated using the model toolbox through a set of novel nexus indicators and criteria (based on relevant SDGs metrics) to assess trade-offs between water status, and food and energy security. GoNEXUS will be applied at global and EU levels and to six river basins representing different features and WEFE challenges in Europe (Danube, Como, Jucar, Tagus-Segura) and Africa (Zambezi, Senegal). The innovative combination of models and Nexus Dialogues will provide more accurate evaluations of future scenarios, enabling knowledge sharing and brokerage, and improving WEFE

GREP-4000: Provision of global physical reanalyses and production of the global reanalysis ensemble product (GREP)

Reanalyses are dynamical, observation-based reconstructions of past ocean state and are the principal way for exploring the existence of processes and trends not mapped by the observation networks. Beside the scientific importance, Reanalyses are growing in popularity within the artificially intelligence sector, being widely exploited as reference states for training ML-based forecasters or simulators. However, each Reanalysis is affected by systematic errors that intrinsically depends on the specific set up of the production system. In this context CMCC is leading an international Consortium that produces and maintains an ensemble of global Reanalyses within the Copernicus Marine Service. Several state-of-the-art products are available for a multitude of different applications from science studies to AI training, together with a day-by-day assessment of reliability and uncertainties of whole ensemble.

GREP: Provision of global physical reanalyses and production of the global reanalysis ensemble product

Reanalyses are dynamical, observation-based reconstructions of past ocean state and are the principal way for exploring the existence of processes and trends not mapped by the observation networks. Beside the scientific importance, Reanalyses are growing in popularity within the artificially intelligence sector, being widely exploited as reference states for training ML-based forecasters or simulators. However, each Reanalysis is affected by systematic errors that intrinsically depends on the specific set up of the production system. In this context CMCC is leading an international Consortium that produces and maintains an ensemble of global Reanalyses within the Copernicus Marine Service. Several state-of-the-art products are available for a multitude of different applications from science studies to AI training, together with a day-by-day assessment of reliability and uncertainties of whole ensemble.  

interTwin – An interdisciplinary Digital Twin Engine for Science

interTwin co-designs and implements the prototype of an interdisciplinary Digital Twin Engine (DTE), an open-source platform that provides generic and tailored software components for modelling and simulation to integrate application-specific Digital Twins (DTs). Its specifications and implementation are based on a co-designed conceptual model – the DTE blueprint architecture – guided by the principles of open standards and interoperability. The ambition is to develop a common approach to the implementation of DTs that is applicable across the whole spectrum of scientific disciplines and beyond to facilitate developments and collaboration.  Co-design involves DT use cases for High energy physics, Radio astronomy, Astroparticle physics, Climate research, and Environmental monitoring, whose complex requirements are expected to significantly advance the state of the art of modelling and simulation using heterogeneous distributed digital infrastructures, advanced workflow composition, real-time data management and processing, quality and uncertainty tracing of models, data fusion and analytics. As a result, a consolidation of software technologies supporting research will emerge.  The validation of the technology with multiple infrastructure facilities will boost the accessibility of users to technological capacity and the support of AI uptake in research. interTwin builds on the capacities of experts from pan-European research infrastructures and the long tail of science, an Open-Source Community of technology providers that will deliver TRL 6/7 capabilities to implement the interdisciplinary DTE, experts of the European Centre of Excellence in Exascale Computing, and infrastructure providers from the EGI Federation, PRACE and EuroHPC supporting data and compute intensive science. interTwin key exploitable results will

IRIDE (Precursor phase)

The IRIDE program is an innovative project undertaken by the Italian government, in collaboration with the European Space Agency (ESA), to leverage resources from the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR).  The objective of the project is to implement a service portfolio, ready for operations, providing Geospatial Products and to set up the digital tools and the operational scenarios for the provision of the services to IRIDE users, by also taking care of designing and developing suitable exploitation solutions and interfaces with User Operational Systems exploiting the IRIDE Services outputs.  As a result, IRIDE Marketplace will host the service value chains developed within the Service Segment and guarantee a single access point for the Users. 

IRIDE Lot 1

The IRIDE program is an innovative project undertaken by the Italian government in collaboration with the European Space Agency (ESA) to leverage resources from the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR). Phase 2 of IRIDE Lot 1 started in October 2024 following the successful implementation of the IRIDE Precursor Phase. The main purpose of the project is to deliver an operational portfolio of geospatial services and develop digital tools for End and Pilot users within the Thematic Services S1-Coastal and Marine Monitoring, S2- Air Quality, S5- Hydro-Meteorological-Climate, S6- WaterManagement. The operational services allow mapping, monitoring and forecasting of various characteristics of coastal areas (including geomorphological, land use, flooding, habitats etc.) as well as operational model validation, operational air quality monitoring and forecast, pollutant emissions monitoring and assessment, re-analysis of air quality at national scale, hydro-meterological mapping and monitoring atmospheric structure, greenhouse gases and others essential climate variables monitoring, lightening monitoring, flood forecasting and sediment management, etc.

LIQUIDICE: LinkIng and QUantifying the Impacts of climate change on inlanD ICE, snow cover, and permafrost on water resources and society in vulnerable regions

Recognizing the central role played by snow, ice and permafrost in the global climate system, the LIQUIDICE project joins expert cryospheric observers and modelers to: i) comprehensively re-assess the past and future century-plus of climate-induced high impact changes to the Greenland ice sheet and climate vulnerable locations across the Alps, Norway, High Mountain Asia (HMA) and Svalbard, including permafrost areas and their ecosystems; ii) develop new, expanded and harmonized data from satellite Earth Observation (EO) and ground stations; iii) use these data to improve and test a hierarchy of ice sheet and glacier models with Earth System Models (ESMs); iv) through these steps, yield new process understanding, and ultimately v) inform water resource, hydropower, and socio-economic strategies through clear and transparent communication of results and uncertainties. The project’s strengths lie in new multidisciplinary collaborations across 18 research institutions, from eight European countries (Poland, Italy, Denmark, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Norway, United Kingdom) and India, encompassing expertise in field observations, satellite EO techniques, ESM development and application, and socio-economic analysis. Key deliverables include a) FAIR-principled new multi-decade data catalogues of multi-regional snow water equivalent and a 44-year EO-derived albedo record; b) assessments of impact of model resolution and degree of coupling on results; c) refined past and future glacier, ice cap and Greenland ice sheet freshwater fluxes to oceans and global sea level rise with indirect constraint on Antarctica; d) new hydrological simulations for HMA; e) a new framework for a Water Discharge Impact Assessments; f) socio-economic integrated risk and adaptation assessments;

MELTED – MachinE Learning for arcTic ice prEDiction

The Arctic region plays a vital role in the global climate system, it is strongly affected by climate change, and in turn one of its drivers. The Arctic is warming four times faster than the global average, transitioning into an entirely different climate than a few decades ago (Legg, 2021). Satellite data reveal that the September sea ice extent declined by ~13% per decade since 1979 causing major changes in the oceanic heat flux. Changes in the Arctic sea ice impact extreme weather and climate events beyond the Arctic region, favouring extreme Northern Hemisphere winters (Kretschmer et al., 2016) or wetter European summers (Screen, 2013). Arctic changes have a substantial socio-economical relevance (e.g. indigenous communities, shipping and tourism, fisheries), as well as a geopolitical dimension, given possible shipping routes and natural resources exploitation. Understanding the causes of these changes is thus of paramount importance yet substantial gaps still exist. Moreover, numerous studies have demonstrated the limitations of current-generation climate models in accurately representing essential aspects of polar climates, such as Arctic sea ice loss (Wang et al., 2016) or water mass changes (Ilicak et al., 2016).

NECCTON- New Copernicus capability for trophic ocean networks


The ocean’s biodiversity supports the livelihoods of over three billion people, providing vital services, including food and nutrient cycling. However marine policy and resource management do not yet consider the latest scientific advances, even when the state-of- the-art operational models of the European Copernicus Marine Service (CMEMS) are used. The project’s objective is to enable CMEMS to deliver novel products that inform marine biodiversity conservation and food resources management, by fusing new data into innovative ecosystem models that integrate biological and abiotic components, habitats, and stressors of marine ecosystems. NECCTON will inter-link new models in the CMEMS systems, thus building novel capacities to simulate higher-trophic-levels, benthic habitats, pollutants, and deliver projections of climate change impacts. We will develop and exploit new data-processing chains, supporting CMEMS’ use of novel ecosystem observations, including new hyperspectral data from satellites, as well as available acoustic, pollution and omics data. We will fuse these new data and models by using innovative machine-learning algorithms to improve models and data assimilation methods. These developments will be applied in thirteen case studies, co-designed with fisheries and conservation managers as part of our pathway-to-impact, resulting in the demonstration of Technological Readiness Level 6 of NECCTON products. The project objectives will be achieved by a team of twenty-three world-class organizations with track records for all the key project components. It includes the CMEMS Entrusted Entity and core developers, who will promote the final uptake of NECCTON by CMEMS. On project completion, NECCTON will provide CMEMS with the scientific and technical

NEXOGENESIS – Facilitating the next generation of effective and intelligent water-related policies utilising artificial intelligence and reinforcement learning to assess the water-energy-food ecosystem (WEFE) nexus

Water, energy, food, and ecosystems (WEFE) are interconnected, comprising a coherent system (nexus) dominated by complexity and modulated by climatic and socio-economic drivers. Resource constraints, and their interconnectedness could hamper economic development, including optimal trade, market and policy solutions. NEXOGENESIS offers a coherent WEFE nexus framework for the assessment of potential impact pathways of implementing new policy objectives (WFD, RED, CAP, SDGs, Paris Agreement) in the nexus, including: (i) biophysical and socio-economic modelling; (ii) stakeholder engagement together with; (iii) validation of NEXOGENESIS outputs and; (iv) use of the latest artificial intelligence techniques.

ObsSea4Clim: Ocean observations and indicators for climate and assessments

ObsSea4Clim brings together key European actors within ocean observing science, climate assessment, Earth System modelling, data sharing and standards, with users of oceanographic products and services to deliver an improved observation framework based on Essential Ocean & Climate Variables (EOV/ECVs).

OceanICU – Ocean-ICU Improving Carbon Understanding


The Ocean plays a crucial role in the global C cycle, taking up approximately 25% of the CO2 we emit to the atmosphere, and thus slowing the rate of climate change. The future trajectory of this sink will affect the timing and intensity of the modifications to human processes that we need to undertake in order to stabilise atmospheric CO2 at 450ppm. Our ability to measure and model this sink is limited (evidenced by significant discrepancies between measured and modelled C uptake) with the current frontier area of research being a suite of biological processes related to higher trophic level behaviour within the so called biological C pump. This involvement of higher organisms suggests that human activities (fishing, energy and mineral extraction) has the capacity to affect the ocean C sink however we lack the ability to quantitatively link direct human pressures and ocean C storage. Ocean ICU will measure these key processes and evaluate their overall significance, transferring those that are important into models that inform the IPCC process and in this way contribute to resolving the observed model data mismatch of Ocean C sink estimates. We will use the fundamental knowledge we acquire around biological systems to evaluate the ability of human interventions in the ocean to alter the carbon cycle and produce management tools that allow the tension between resource extraction and C storage to be addressed. This component will involve extensive dialogue with end users and stakeholders and lead to a Decision Support Tool that will

ORACS: Ocean Reanalysis Algorithms for Climate Studies

This contract will develop improved algorithms to produce long term ocean reanalyses in the presence of varying observational networks. It will be focused on consistency of climate relevant metrics across 2 periods of increasing observational coverage, in the 1950’s and in the 1980s-90s as altimeter observations become available. The role of different atmospheric forcing and riverine inputs will be tested and the ensemble error covariance approaches suitable for both sparse will be developed and more dense observing networks. It will also address the detection of bias in the assimilated results and make recommendations on how best to treat bias under varying observational conditions. Finally new post-processed smoothing methods to more fully use observations and to spread information back to influence more sparsely observed periods will be applied. A set of Recommendations will be made to CMEMS to aid in the production of a climate- consistent long period ocean reanalysis in the final report.

PIISA: Piloting Innovative Insurance Solutions for Adaptation

PIISA is a project funded by HORIZON Europe RIA (Research and Innovation Action) aiming to develop and deploy a range of insurance innovations that incite households and firms to adapt proactively and sufficiently for their own sake and their neighborhood’s sake. PIISA incites public authorities to set up adaptation and create adaptation promoting conditions. PIISA co-develops climate resilient insurance portfolios and develops solutions for sharing losses and climate risk data.

PNRR-HPC – “SPOKE 4 EARTH & CLIMATE”: National Centre for HPC, Big Data and Quantum Computing

Within Spoke 4, the scientific activity of CMCC, and of the Spoke affiliated partners, will be mainly aimed at developing a shared interdisciplinary framework for advanced Earth System Models and numerical experimentations. The framework will be focused on digital infrastructures and efficient workflows to streamline the production, facilitate the training, accelerate the understanding, and improve the quality of climate simulations and predictions.

RaZorEGe: Regional ocean Zooms for Extremes and impacts at Global and local scales

Regional ocean Zooms for Extremes and impacts at Global and local scales (RaZorEGe) will develop and implement Earth System Models (ESMs) capable of robustly representing regional aspects of climate while remaining affordable for efficient global multi-centennial simulation. Projections of regional climate variability, change and extremes remain challenging to simulate with ESMs for a variety of reasons, including local process representation, errors in remote teleconnections and the inherently greater variability of regional climate requiring larger ensembles. For Europe, the representation of the Gulf Stream, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation and the Mediterranean are all key uncertainties for future change, while other ocean boundary currents (the Kuroshio in the Pacific and the Antarctic Circumpolar Current in the Southern Ocean) are key for East Asian and South Africa respectively. We propose to achieve this improvement through targeted developments in ocean and sea-ice models, based on understanding the relationships between regional climate indices and ocean/sea-ice model biases. We will use a range of techniques, including regional changes in horizontal and vertical resolution, as well as new parameterisations. One key aspect of the targeted nature of the developments will be to keep the model efficient enough to be affordable with Earth System complexity included, hence trying to bring together improved physical and biogeochemical processes. Once demonstrated, these enhancements will be implemented in ESMs and simulations performed that will contribute to the next Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP7) and next IPCC. The limited cost increase, and targeted process improvements will mean that these enhancements should also

RESCUE: Response of the Earth System to overshoot, Climate neUtrality and negative Emissions

The RESCUE project will improve knowledge and understanding on the “Climate and Earth System responses to climate neutrality and net negative emissions”, by pursuing two overall objectives: 1) Quantify the climate and Earth system responses to pathways achieving climate neutrality by Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) deployment with and without temperature overshoot, and 2) Assess the potential role of CDR in reducing net GHG emissions, as well as its potential environmental risks and co-benefits.

RIVIERADE: Improving modelling methods to produce climate services for resilient European seas and coasts in a decadal to multi-decadal horizon

Delivering validated climate services for resilient European Sea on a decadal to multi-decadal horizon is a challenge. RIVIERADE brings together the scientific communities geared into CORDEX and the Copernicus Marine Service and capitalizes on their unique scientific experience to develop and implement a pre-operational and replicable multi-model framework and protocols to produce, downscale, assess and deliver state-of-the-art decadal predictions and multi-decadal projections of climate change and related impacts on marine ecosystems, covering the basin scale and the coastal areas, up to, and including, development and demonstration of climate services. RIVIERADE will target three European Seas (Baltic, Black, Mediterranean), to produce data and information for ocean health, sustainable blue economy, and coastal climate risks, down streaming the data flow from climate ensembles to coastal areas at different spatial resolutions and for selected areas, in a circular process based on users and stakeholders engagement, co-design and assessment of innovative climate services. 

SDGs-EYES – Sustainable Development Goals – Enhanced monitoring through the family of copErnicus Services

The UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development is a data driven agenda, and the use of Earth Observation (EO) can make the SDG indicators’ monitoring and reporting technically and financially viable, and comparable across countries.  SDGs-EYES aims to boost the European capacity for monitoring the SDGs based on Copernicus, building a portfolio of decision-making tools to monitor those SDG indicators related to the environment from an inter-sectoral perspective, aligning with the EU Green Deal priorities and challenges. SDGs-EYES will establish an integrated scientific, technological and user engagement framework overcoming the knowledge and technical barriers that prevent the exploitation, combination and cross-feeding of data and tools from the Copernicus’s six core Services, its space-based and in-situ components, and other platforms and portals.  SDGs-EYES considers three interconnected SDGs, on climate (SDG13), ocean (SDG14) and land (SDG15), to demonstrate through four Pilots the Copernicus potential for monitoring six indicators making part of the EU and national assessments: GHG emissions, temperature deviation, ocean acidification, marine eutrophication, forest cover change and soil erosion. Although focusing on the biosphere, these indicators are linked to other SDGs on socio-economic and (geo)political factors (e.g., human health, resources security, poverty, conflicts, displacements). Thus, an additional cross-goals indicator and Pilot will focus on vulnerable communities under cumulative climate extreme hazards.  SDGs-EYES seeks to combine the science-informed (top-down) approach with a stakeholder-driven (bottom-up) approach to transfer scientific outcomes into easy-to-understand and easy-to-use actionable information in the context of SDG indicators’ assessment. Decision-making tools delivered by Pilots will be co-designed with users,

SICAP: Sea Ice model Calibration for improved Artic Predictions

The Sea Ice model Calibration for improved Arctic Predictions (SICAP) project aims to develop and deliver an innovative calibration tool to be applied to sea ice models, to improve the quality of the Arctic sea ice predictions and regional/global reanalyses.

SILVANUS – Integrated Technological and Information Platform for wildfire Management

SILVANUS envisages to deliver an environmentally sustainable and climate resilient forest management platform through innovative capabilities to prevent and combat against the ignition and spread of forest fires. The platform will cater to the demands of efficient resource utilisation and provide protection against threats of wildfires encountered globally. The project will establish synergies between (i) environmental; (ii) technology and (iii) social science experts for enhancing the ability of regional and national authorities to monitor forest resources, evaluate biodiversity, generate more accurate fire risk indicators and promote safety regulations among citizens through awareness campaigns. The novelty of SILVANUS lies in the development and integration of advanced semantic technologies to systematically formalise the knowledge of forest administration and resource utilisation. Additionally, the platform will integrate a big-data processing framework capable of analysing heterogeneous data sources including earth observation resources, climate models and weather data, continuous on-board computation of multi-spectral video streams. Also, the project integrates a series of sensor and actuator technologies using innovative wireless communication infrastructure through the coordination of aerial vehicles and ground robots. The technological platform will be complemented with the integration of resilience models, and the results of environmental and ecological studies carried out for the assessment of fire risk indicators based on continuous surveys of forest regions. The surveys are designed to take into consideration the expertise and experience of frontline fire fighter organisations who collectively provide support for 47,504×104 sq. meters of forest area within Europe and across international communities. The project innovation will be validated

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