Outputs by the Arctic Monitoring Forecasting Center are being used for Norwegian emergency response tools, among many other societally relevant applications. Laurent Bertino (DA research leader) and colleagues from MET Norway and the Institute of Marine Research summarized the changes and improvements made to the forecasting center’s products since it was established in 2015.

The Copernicus Marine Environment Monitoring Service (CMEMS) belongs to the EU’s Earth Observation program “Copernicus” and focuses on the ocean, and the Arctic Marine Forecasting Center is part of it. The Nansen Center is one of the contributors to CMEMS. Free information and data are available on their website for everyone to see and work with, covering physical, sea-ice, and biogeochemical processes in the oceans both for regional seas and on the global scale. CMEMS offers 200 products and 155 TB of data to around 34.000 users.

Who uses all that information?

One of the most important assets of CMEMS are the forecasts: predicting what happens to, for example, the sea surface temperature 10 days from now. The opposite of that, and also crucial, are hindcasts: looking back in time at how the sea surface temperature was 10 days ago, or even 30 years ago. Both are necessary to know how “normal” the present situation is. CMEMS is the only operational marine data portal with such a range of disciplines and completeness. The EU and other international policies and initiatives are therefore building upon information from CMEMS, as the data have a wide range of applications from maritime safety and ship routing over combating pollution to climate monitoring and forecasting!

What has changed since 2015?

When the Arctic Monitoring Forecasting Center was set up in 2015 and "Copernicus period 1" started, four products were available, produced by NERSC researchers. Since then, much has happened! Four new products have been added since 2015, and all of the existing products have been improved!  Bertino and his colleagues have summarized the main advancements of the past six years; they published their findings both as a technical report for the European Commission and an article in the Proceedings of the 9^th EuroGOOS International Conference "Advances in Operational Oceanography".

• Surface waves are now part of the forecasts and hindcasts! They are now so precise that they are used for navigation purposes and supporting offshore operations. Also: Their high resolution allows them be used for search and rescue operations, as well as oil spill mitigation.
• Last year, tides and storm surges were also added with a high resolution. Since Norway has the second longest coastline in the world (over 100.000 km!), tides and storm surges are quite relevant here. This product and the wave forecast are part of the Norwegian emergency response tools.
• Another improved product of high importance to Norway - and NERSC - is a sea-ice forecast. The forecast is being produced by our Sea Ice Modelling group, using their state-of-the-art sea-ice model neXtSIM, and it is much more detailed than the previous sea-ice forecast (see the comparison between TOPAZ and neXtSIM). The neXtSIM-based sea-ice forecast finds applications in navigation services.
• The biogeochemical model has been upgraded twice in forecast and once in hindcast mode. Now it is possible to predict the primary production in the Arctic Ocean much better than before, which is important for simulating the carbon cycle.
• And finally, for those who do not have the time to download the data but prefer to directly see the main tendencies, now two Ocean Monitoring Indicators are in place, showing water and sea ice exchanges between the Arctic Ocean and the North Atlantic from the early 1990’s to the present.

Example of sea ice thickness from the traditional sea ice model in TOPAZ4 (left) and the new neXtSIM-F forecast (right), as seen from the MyOcean viewer. Note the higher level of details of cracks, arches and other sea ice features. Credits: The Copernicus Marine MyOcean Viewer has been developed by Lobelia Earth. This Viewer contains Copernicus Service information. The basemap layer contains information from the GSHHG dataset by the University of Hawaii (UH) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). By clicking on the image, you can see a higher resolution version opening in a separate window.

The Nansen Center’s contribution to CMEMS

Laurent Bertino on the future of our involvement in CMEMS: “We will not stop here, and we have plans to further improve the resolution and accuracy of our products in the coming “Copernicus 2” period, including for example the effect of waves into the ocean and the use of forecasted river discharges. We will also provide a neXtSIM reanalysis and TOPAZ physical and biogeochemical hindcasts for the past 70 years.”

An interesting visualization tool by Copernicus, free for everyone to use, is "MyOcean" (see the comparison between TOPAZ and neXtSIM). Here you can see all products in action, and if you want, you can search for "NERSC (Norway)" as originating centre. All these forecasts and hindcasts come from our collaboration with MET Norway and IMR. Our involved researchers are Laurent Bertino, Annette Samuelsen, Jiping Xie, Tsuyoshi Wakamatsu, Çaglar Yumruktepe, Timothy Williams, Roshin P. Raj, Achref Othmani, Johnny A. Johannessen and many former colleagues! NERSC also contributes to the sea ice thematic assembly center led by MET Norway with an automated sea ice remote sensing classification algorithm and quality control activities.

Background information

CMEMS is being implemented on behalf of the European Commission by Mercator Ocean International. The company has recently welcomed international shareholders from five European countries, and in Norway, the Nansen Center is the main shareholder. Together with MET Norway, the Institute for Marine Research, and the Norwegian Polar Institute, we are involved in the future of CMEMS! 

Reference:

Bertino, L, Ali, A, Carrasco, A, Lien, V, & A Melsom. The Arctic Marine Forecasting Center in the first Copernicus Period. 9th EuroGOOS International conference, Shom; Ifremer; EuroGOOS AISBL, May 2021, Brest, France. pp. 256-265. hal-03334274v2