Resumen de Marcoast network: a provision of eo-based services for marine and coastal aplic
Jerome Bruniquel, Araceli Pi Figueroa, Gordon Campbell
The Marine & COASTal environmental information services project (MarCoast) is port of the GMES Service Element (GSE) programme, managed and funded by the European Space Agency (ESA). The project started with a consortium composed of 32 partners from 10 European countries , and gathers all key actors in the field of marine and coastal applications. Additional activity is expected to expand the initial scope of the delivered services, both in term of geographical coverage and/or added services.MarCoast targets to deliver a single portfolio of marine and coastal services at the European scale. The portfolio is composed of 6 service lines which are: oil spill surveillance and customised information, oil spill drift forecast, water quality monitoring and alert, HAB monitoring, evolution and forecasting, water quality assessment service, met-ocean data.
One of the specificity of marCoast as for each GSE project, is the strong commitment of users; this commitment is formalized through Service Level Agreement (SLA), signed between the service provider and the user. Signed SLA is mandatory to start any service activity. MarCoast makes use of all sensors dedicated to marine application, such as SAR systems (ASAR and RSAT-I) for oil spills, ocean colour sensors (MERis and MODIS) for water quality applications, Altimeter, radiometers, and scatterometer sensors support the production of metocean data. In the future GMES sentinels 1 and 3 will be the 2 main missions on which MarCoast services wikk rely on.
