Part 1 – Presentation by Joël Dorandeu, Technical Direct of CMEMS

Welcome to this second InfoDay for the Copernicus Marine Environment Monitoring Service (CMEMS). As you may know we’ve already held the 1^st InfoDay last February 6^th. The goal was to inform for the 1^st time how Mercator Ocean manages the implementation of the CMEMS. The philosophy of these InfoDays just to recall you that we clearly want to inform all the stakeholders or the users all those who are interested in CMEMS how Mercator Ocean plans to implement this service. We think it’s important to regularly provide a lot of information, as much as we can, about how we are proceeding for this implementation. Today we’ll have an overview of the status of the implementation of CMEMS by Mercator Ocean. I will give this overview. Just to recall you that I’m the Technical Director of CMEMS for Mercator Ocean and we are today with Yann Drillet who is the Leader of the R&D department at Mercator Ocean and he’s also in charge of the activity particularly related to the global monitoring and forecasting center for the CMEMS.

The idea of last time was of course to collect your questions. You have the opportunity to answer your questions online. This session is recorded so we can write the transcript and/or answer particular questions afterwards.

First, I would like to give an overview of the status of the implementation by Mercator Ocean of the CMEMS. As you may know, we had a first batch of open calls in order to procure the main production center, the main components in charge of the production for the CMEMS. These first ITTS were dedicated to ensure the service continuity with respect to the former MyOcean service which was in the frame of the previous activity. We have opened the called last mid-January. We collected the proposals last March 10^th, which was the last day to collect calls. Now, we are in the process to evaluate these proposals in order to select the contractors who will be in charge of the production service starting May 1^st. So we are on good track. We are quite optimistic that we will be able to ensure the service continuity at the beginning of May in order to have a seemless transition between the MyOcean service and the CMEMS for the users. As you may know, this is the first requirement that we have, is to ensure the continuity for the users because we have every day a lot of operational users or scientific users who are connected to our service so it’s important to ensure this continuity.

The second point is that we transition between MyOcean to the CMEMS in a secured environment. This is the reason why we only opened to the competition, for the moment, the production centers. These production centers will be integrated into the Central Information System (CIS) in April/May so that everything can work properly for the users in May. The CIS has not been opened to competition for the moment in order to have this conservative technical situation for integrating all the production centers. That will ensure the continuity of the service. Of course, we will open the CIS and all its components for competition after the transition period, end of 2015. So that these very important components of the service will be procured also through open competition in 2016. As I said, the production centers have been the subject of the first batch of calls last May. As you know, Mercator Ocean is directly in charge of the global monitoring and forecasting center which means Mercator Ocean will produce operationally the model output for analysis and forecasting of physical and biogeochemical variables for the global ocean starting May 1^st. However there are several components in this global monitoring forecasting center: first of all, we have the high resolution global system which Mercator Ocean is in charge of, but there are also other components like an observation component which is dedicated to the production of multi-observation product and provision of inputs for the global system and the second component is the coupled atmostphere-ocean system which is also part of the global monitoring and forecasting center.

In this second phase, we will also open to competition these 2 components. Just to inform you, these 2 other components have just been opened to competition and this Friday March 20^th, you will be able to have access on the central tenders system of the European Commission to these 2 ITTs that will be opened to competition. That is clearly and important step to us.

Part 2 – Global system components presentation by Yann Drillet, R&D Manager at Mercator Ocean

(Slide being shared)

Few words about the global components, on this illustration you can see how it is organized. Just to explain that for the global monitoring and forecasting center, Mercator Ocean is in charge of the coordination of all these activities and is also in charge of some development and operation of several components. As in all monitoring and forecasting centers in Copernicus, there is external interfaces, as you can see on the left side of the picture, and the internal interfaces with the thematic assembling centers who are in charge of delivering several types of observations. The external interfaces, with actors which are not in the Copernicus context, concern atmospheric forcing for example or other observations. Inside the global MFC there is also several components: first, the global high resolution system operated by Mercator Ocean, it is based on a high resolution global physical component and also biogeochemical component. This system delivers every day, 7-day forecast for the physics and every week for the biogeochemistry. Mercator Ocean is in charge of this part and there are 2 other components: the global observation component with several functions, the first one is the quality control of observations ,it is an additional quality control observation procedure dedicated for modelbefore assimilation of this observation in the global system. This component is also in charge of the production of gridded product only based on multi-observation (in situ and satellite observations) this production is in near-real time and these products are useful for the users and also for the global forecasting centers to validate the production.There is also the same kind of production in delayed mode to have a longer and homogeneous period with this multi observation product. So there’s a first open call dedicated for this component and which will be accessible really soon in a few days. The second part is the global coupled component dedicated to atmospheric and ocean coupled system. It is based on physical component at medium resolution,¼ degree resolution approximatively is required. It will deliver also a 7-day forecast every day. There is a complementary approach between the high resolution system and the global component coupled system because we want to show for several applications for users what is the improvement and benefit of a coupled system vs. a forced system. The last point is the central part of the picture which is the global reanalysis. So part of this activity will be subcontracting later by Mercator Ocean but Mercator Ocean is also in charge of the global high resolution reanalysis, in charge of the biogeochemistry reanalysis and in charge of the production of an ensemble reanalysis which will be based on several reanalysis produced by several production centers. . We don’t know exactly when but during this year a new open call will be published concerning this last part and especially to produce this ensemble global reanalysis. Finally, there are several diffusion units in this global monitoring and forecasting center to deliver all the products with external interface with external users and internal interface to ensure the link between global MFC and several regional monitoring and forecasting centers and with thematic assembling centers.

Part 3 – Summary

Just to summarize what was just been said: so far, we’re at in the first phase with the production centers to be procured, then we’ll have these 2 open calls related specifically to the global systems. These calls will be opened by Friday March 20^th 2015. Then, there will also be other phases: the CIS will be opened in May 2015, then we’ll have other components that we’ve just covered.

While the questions are coming in, I’ll talk a little bit about the next phases of this procurement process for the implementation of the CMEMS by Mercator Ocean. During the last InfoDay we talked about the other important activities to be implemented: not only the production centers, the CIS but also important actions related to science and also related to users. For this, we have imagined we could implement a framework service element which is related to these specific actions that could contribute to the quality of the CMEMS. The idea is to have these dedicated actions that will be, in fact, implemented as scientific studies or application studies (ie use cases, demonstrations) in order to first, contribute for the future of the CMEMS by R&D related to the development of the marine service capability for the mid to long-term and second, have a direct connection to the applications and the users through the demonstrations of the usefulness of the marine service for the applications. So for this framework service element, we will also implement an open call process in order to procure the activities and to connect to the main framework of the marine service.

Part 4 – Q&A

Q: what is the place of this MFC inside the CMEMS? Especially, what are the relations between the DU with the CIS?
Joël Dorandeu: I think we are talking about the Global MFC. As we said, the Global MFC is directly operated by Mercator Ocean and we have these 2 particular components for first, the observations and second, the coupled systems. These 2 components will be fully integrated into the CMEMS and integrated in particular in connection with the Central Information System (CIS) and these 2 components will be directly integrated out of all the other production centers which means that the interfaced between these 2 particular components in terms of dissemination or dissemination units with the CIS will be exactly the same as for the other production centers so we standardize interfaces, format, protocols, define in the frame of the statement of work that will be accessible on Friday March 20^th.

Yann Drillet: There will be several diffusion units within the Global MFC. All these diffusion units who will be located in different places, will be connected via the CIS with exactly the same component, structure, and protocol.

Q: what is the appropriate mechanism to issue requirements?

Joël Dorandeu: These requirements, in respect to the marine service, if you want to issue requirements, there are many aspects that we can address.

If it is for the European stakeholders, in particular, European agencies, there will be a specific process in which we will contact all the European agencies in order to have specific meetings with them to focus on specific requirements that they would have with respect to the marine service. This will be implemented the first month of the operational phase of CMEMS next May 2015. Then, of course, like we already had in MyOcean, we’ll organize workshops and user workshops in which not only users can attend but also downstream providers, intermediate users, and main users like European agencies will be able to contribute and to interact with us. These workshops will be organize at least once a year in order to interact directly with the users. This is the main direct interaction processes that we will implement. And then, of course, there is a direct connection to the users thanks to the implementation of the Service Desk. It runs every day as an operational human process and service and we also have an online forum so any user can ask their questions about the evolution of the service. But the European agencies, which are specific users, we’ll probably have dedicated meetings.
Q: How will appear the ITT? Through JOUE or bOAMP?

Joël Dorandeu: The ITTs will appear in JOUE. It will be on the TED system (Tender Electronic System) of the European Union. You can access it through the European Union portal or through the Mercator Ocean’s website. It will be redirection to the TED system.
Q: when will the forum be online?

Alice Vu: the forum is already online. Its name will change in the upcoming weeks but as of today, you can access it through forum.myocean.eu.

Joël Dorandeu: Just to precise, we are currently in the frame of the MyOcean Follow On project so the online forum can be accessible from the MyOcean website which is very easy to access. You can, of course, interact with the forum and we will take into account specific requirements from MyOcean and we will take into account these requirements in the next phase.

There will be a change in the transition from MyOcean service to CMEMS in the website (myocean.eu) on May 1^st and of course, we will maintain the forum capability alive so everyone can interact with the CMEMS through the forum in the next phase.

Part 5 – Thank you

Thank you for attending this 2^nd InfoDay, we hope to see you again for the next InfoDay end of April, early May about the Service Evolution.