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Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - CEASELESS (Copernicus Evolution and Aplications with Sentinel Enhancements and Land Effluents for Shores and Seas)

Teaser

Summary

The main settings for the CEASELESS project are:

a) New wealth of satellite data becoming available (with emphasis on the Sentinel family), that cover a wider range of oceanographic and even coastal processes.
b) New (higher) resolution and prediction capabilities for met-ocean variables, that allow coupling and assimilation at unprecedented scales.
c) New coastal zone requirements (e.g. wind profiles for renewable energy) or applications (e.g. coastal water quality) that prompt new advances for coastal oceanography.

The potential of new products derived from CMEMS data (simulated and observed), incorporating a wide range of coastal processes, assimilation and metrics is at the core of CEASELESS, where the main overall objectives are:

- Recovery and application of new Sentinel data (S-1 winds, S-2 visible/infrared products related to water colour and bathymetry and S-3 altimetry) to derive a spatial structure for coastal processes.
- Assimilation strategies that better condition data in coastal areas, necessarily limited in spatial scales and therefore with limited â€œmemoryâ€ effects for assimilation.
- Actual application of met-ocean predictions for selected users in the four pilot sites considered: Danish coast, German Bight, Catalan coast and North Adriatic. This should allow a proof of concept for the new prediction capabilities, highlighting application limits and providing feedback to CMEMS for further developing their coastal dimension.

Work performed

The CEASELESS project has applied Sentinel data to the selected pilot sites plus North Sea and global oceans, prompting in some cases a demand for new data sets not offered initially (e.g. such as the wind fields in the central Mediterranean, together with high resolution models existing at the participating institutions). This has allowed an efficient testing of unstructured grids so as to better capture coastline irregularities and sea bed geometry and forms. Combining flexible meshes with coupled wind-wave-current models provides a challenge that can only be solved with a joint support of in-situ observations and the new Sentinel data, with horizontal resolution going down to10m (e.g. in Sentinel-2) and a much higher frequency for revisit times (order 1 week), when compared to previously available remote sensing information.

The new Sentinel data, together with other existing satellite measurements (e.g. Jason-2, Jason-3, CryoSat-2, SARAL/AltiKa or Envisat) are supporting a much needed spatial structure to complement the temporal variability captured by in-situ (pointwise) time series. The CEASELESS project is analysing the most efficient approaches for a) Global, b) North Sea and c) Mediterranean met ocean conditions to reduce and make explicit the error level associated to coastal predictions and how this varies with distance to the shore and with prediction horizon.

These new coastal products are being tested and interactively adapted to suit the practical requirements for a number of selected applications:

- Risk assessment in the North Sea (e.g. under the impact of Atlantic storms) and also for the Mediterranean (e.g. under Medicanes for the North Adriatic).
- Offshore wind farms covering the meteo-oceanographic components (e.g. wind or wave loads, supply operations, etc) and even looking at the bed interactions (e.g. scouring in front of structures).
- Search and rescue applications considering meteorological and oceanographic factors and how they affect trajectories, boat operations or safety.
- Water quality applications including aquaculture in the North Sea and Mediterranean but also bathing water quality in areas conditioned by land discharges.

Final results

The CEASELESS project is contributing to a quantum leap for understanding and predicting coastal oceanography based on the already mentioned developments of satellite/in-situ data, high resolution models and novel assimilation approaches. The main progress, this first year, beyond the state of the art can be highlighted by the following elements:

1. Recovery algorithms for coastal areas where, making use of the difference between leading/trailing wave forms of the altimetric echos it should be possible to reinterpret a previously discarded set of data that could enrich the available observations.
2. Assessing the actual value of assimilation for coastal scales, combining the spatial structure of satellite data with the temporal variation of in-situ records, showing how that could bound errors and enrich predictions for the main meteorological and oceanographic variables in the context of high resolution, coupled, wind-wave-current models.
3. New parameterizations for the air-sea interface that, incorporating the actual turbulence production/dissipation may lead to physically improved closures for near surface turbulence and the parameterization of wind drag effects.
4. Quantitative assessment of the importance of coastal emerged topography and submerged bathymetry in conditioning wind fields and the resulting wave/current predictions, with sharp gradients that interact with the overall energy levels.
5. The role of the 3D land discharges from rivers in the selected pilot sites, mainly in terms of water but also regarding sediments and nutrients, showing how the land boundary condition can play an important role in coastal oceanography.

From these results our coastal products are being offered to selected end users (public harbour authorities such as, for instance, Hamburg and Barcelona and coastal authorities from the Catalan coast, the North Adriatic coast or the German Bight; private companies such as Vattenfall for renewable energy in the Danish coast). This will demonstrate the actual benefit of more accurate predictions with explicit error limits for applications that can be summarized by:

a) Risk assessment (linked to erosion or flooding processes for the selected pilot sites but mainly for the German Bight, Catalan coast and North Adriatic).
b) Renewable energy (for the selected pilot sites but mainly for the Horns Rev Area in the Danish coast regarding safety and operation of the structures) and
c) Water quality for the selected pilot sites but mainly for the Danish coast and Catalan coast and affecting uses such as tourism or aquaculture.

This will serve as proof of concept for the role that coastal processes play in the meteo-oceanographic predictions and the importance of combining in-situ data with satellite measurement for restricted coastal domains. It is in these areas close to the land-sea border where gradients and duration limits increase the overall error with respect to open sea oceanography. This challenge can be partially overcome by the higher resolution and improved recovery algorithms for satellite data, the unstructured grid modelling suites and the novel assimilation approaches linking the former two. The range of applications considered and the requirements from our end users also underpin the pressing development required for this type of coastal oceanographic products.