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IUGG XXIV General Assembly July 2-13, 2007 Perugia, Italy
(S) - IASPEI - International Association of Seismology and Physics of the Earth's
Interior
JSS003 Oral Presentation 1848
MarCoast Network: a provision of EO-Based services for marine and
coastal applications
Mrs. Araceli Pi Figueroa
Business Development Starlab
Jrme Bruniquel, Marina Martinez-Garcia
The MARine & COASTal environmental information services project (MarCoast) is part 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 applications, such as SAR systems
(ASAR and RSAT-1) 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 will
rely on. MarCoast is a unique opportunity to gather in the same project end-users, service providers and
system developers. As such, it demonstrates that GMES services are about to reach the needed level of
maturity that will ensure sustainability.
Keywords: operational, marine, services