Greetings all,

By the end of April 2008, the final meeting of the MERSEA European Project set up in Paris, in the Institut Océanographique.

The aim of the project was to develop a European system for operational monitoring and forecasting on global and regional scales of the ocean physics, biogeochemistry and ecosystems.

It was surely a challenge to get together many different partners to build the future European operational oceanography of
tomorrow. It was also a challenge for the MERSEA teams to demonstrate their capacity to collect, validate and assimilate remote sensed and in situ data into ocean circulation models, to interpolate in time and space for uniform coverage, to run nowcasting (i.e. data synthesis in real-time), forecasting, and hind-casting, and to deliver information products. The project also had to develop marine applications addressing the needs of both intermediate and end-users, whether institutional or from the private sector

This Newsletter collects some of the many results obtained during this project. Several aspects are tackled: global and regional forecasting systems, observations, and applications.

The News is written by the Coordinator of the Project, Yves Desaubies. He draws MERSEA results up.

In a first article, Marie Drévillon et al. present the MERSEA/Mercator-Ocean V2 global ocean analysis and forecasting system. In a second one, Hervé Roquet et al. describe L3 and L4 high resolution SST products. The next article, written by Bruce Hackett et al., focuses on Oil spill applications. The article of John Siddorn et al. closes the issue by a description of the development of a North-East Atlantic tidal NEMO system.

Enjoy your reading!

• Mersea, a precursor to GMES Marine Core Service
• The Mercator Ocean global 1/12° operational system: Demonstration phase in the MERSEA context
• Ocean circulation and water properties in 2007 described by the MERSEA/Mercator Ocean V2 global ocean analysis and forecasting system
• MERSEA multi-sensor satellite SST products
• Oil spill fate forecasting in the MERSEA Integrated Project
• Mersea Developments at the Met Office