High Resolution Water Quality Information Services at Sea for Ports and Aquaculture*

Achieving the goal of real time water quality monitoring is one of the critical steps to develop sustainable growth, regulations and frameworks for marine activities. Improved management of marine resources is likely to enhance industry resilience and adaptive capacity under climate change. Among others, ports and aquaculture activities are strongly influenced by environmental conditions and therefore can benefit from short-term forecasts of water quality. Short-term environmental fluctuations, including sea water temperature, chlorophyll concentration and turbidity, wind velocity, and current velocity, combined with long-term climate-related trends, can indeed impact growth rates of cultured animals and wild stock habitat distributions and navigation’s safety. To this end, Earth Observation and numerical models have proved to be complementary for the development and the provision of forecasts of future conditions. However, the accuracy and spatial resolution of the data play a crucial role in representing physical, chemical and biological processes. The European funded HiSea project aims at tackling these issues by delivering accurate and reliable information, easily understandable and with a high resolution to fit and improve seamlessly users’ operation, planning and management requirements of different marine activities. The HiSea services will integrate high resolution Copernicus Services Products, local monitoring data and advanced numerical modelling. The added value of the offered services is in the fusion and merging of different data types including data provided by the users/citizens and the estimation of their uncertainties. Such information services include among others early warning services, real-time crisis management, key performance indicators, information for planning operations, and a knowledge database.

*This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 821934.