Improving Models for Marine EnviRonment SErvices

Objective

The overarching goal of IMMERSE project is to ensure that the Copernicus Marine Environment Monitoring Service (CMEMS) will have continuing access to world-class marine modelling tools for its next generation systems while leveraging advances in space and information technologies, therefore allowing it to address the ever-increasing and evolving demands for marine monitoring and prediction in the 2020s and beyond.

In response to the future priorities for CMEMS, IMMERSE will develop new capabilities to:
- enable the production of ocean forecasts and analyses that exploit upcoming high resolution satellite datasets,
- deliver ocean analyses and forecasts with the higher spatial resolution and additional process complexity demanded by users,
- exploit the opportunities of new high performance computing (HPC) technology
- allow easy interfacing of CMEMS products with detailed local coastal models.

These developments will be delivered in the NEMO ocean model, an established, world-class ocean modelling system that already forms the basis of the majority of CMEMS analysis and forecast products. Hence the pathway from the research in IMMERSE to implementation in CMEMS will be simple and seamless, as the model code developed will be directly applicable in CMEMS models. NEMO has a long track record of producing and maintaining a stable, robustly engineered code base of the type that is needed for operational applications, including CMEMS.

The IMMERSE consortium combines world-class expertise in ocean modelling, applied mathematics and HPC, established software engineering processes and infrastructure, and in-depth knowledge of the CMEMS systems and downstream CMEMS systems. Thus IMMERSE is exceptionally well placed to deliver the operational-quality model code required to meet the emerging needs of CMEMS, and maintain it into the future.
We indeed believe that a three-month extension of the project allow us to better assess the impact of new developments to NEMO on our prototype CMEMS systems (WP6), to better assess the impact of CMEMS service evolutions onto downstream applications (WP8) and also offer some interesting opportunities for communicating the results of the project to the broader NEMO and CMEMS communities (WP2).
In more detail :
The evaluation of the IBI Zoom demonstrator, which has been developed as part of IMMERSE would directly benefit from an extension. The team has made very good progress and D6.1 is now ready for submission after internal review. Still, the re-organisation of the workshare, in the context of the departure of Ocean Next and the difficulties encountered at EPPE, implies that a larger fraction of the work will be done by the same staff. Should they have a bit more time, they would be able to perform more in depth analysis. This will in particular allow them to fully exploit the work done by IMEDEA through the subcontracting. I think this activity is key for demonstrating the impact of NEMO development on future CMEMS systems.
The extension will also allow the groups involved in WP8 to produce more consolidated results regarding the impact of service evolutions on downstream applications. There again, the teams are making good progress although several of them have encountered hiring difficulties in the post-covid context. It should be stressed that the quality of their results somewhat depends on the ability of the involved teams to articulate IMMERSE funding with other on-going activities in their groups. Here again I think that the proposed extension will mechanically improve the quality of the output of WP8.
A key dimension of the final phase of the project is the communication of our results to the broader NEMO and CMEMS communities. These activities have generally been slowed down during the project because of the pandemics and the subsequent difficulties in planning events and travels. As a consequence, the resources planned for formatting and communicating our results have n