List of services

To address global ocean environmental challenges that affect the Earth system, a key aspect is the implementation of an integrated approach of ocean observation, meaning: i) integrating various observation systems as the European Ocean Observation System (EOO) is advocating for, and ii) integrating marine research fields in its observing strategy for an environmental approach.

The EMSO marine infrastructure is focusing on the observation of the open ocean, beyond the continent shelf to explore the seabed the water column and is operating in 14 fixed marine regions, which is making it unique.

EMSO ERIC is dedicated to observe the same points and areas on the long term as necessary to improve understanding impacts of the climate change and to disentangle the various variability signals acting from (sub-)mesoscale (eddies, fronts, meanders) to regional ones and from tens of days to decades. Thanks to the seabed part of its infrastructure it also operates observations for the study and monitoring of geophysics phenomenon such as earthquakes and the generated tsunamis in several areas.

The main initial challenge to address these questions, as an infrastructure distributed over eleven deep regional sites plus three shallow water test sites, stands firstly in the sustainability of the operation at all sites, under the umbrella of a community vision, i.e. with a common scientific and technological strategy. Indeed, because of the quantity and of the diversity in the 125 parameters acquired in our hostile (because deep, high pressure and corrosive) marine environment, the implementation phase of EMSO ERIC had to firstly address the pre-existing heterogeneity of the scientific and sampling strategy and of the consequent unharmonised operating of the measuring systems. This constitutes the basement of EMSO ERIC: the operation of measurement systems and platforms under the leadership of the associated indispensable scientific and technological expertise.

After these considerations, we can state the Primary services of EMSO, or the so-called Upstream Services of EMSO, necessary to develop and operate Downstream Services addressing the stakeholders’ benefit:

• the Federated Observational Service for Data Generation with the 14 regional facilities
• the Support and expertise service
• the Service for fundraising and project management

The Upstream Services enable the Downstream Services that are accessible to the user community:

• the Physical Access Service: offering access to the hardware part of EMSO for any user
• the Service for the federation of harmonised Data flows to funnel the data from the various observatories towards the EU data aggregators (EMODNET, CMEMS, Blue Cloud)
• the Data access service, to discover and retrieve the data
• the Service for Data Storage and computational resources
• the EMSO Academy: a service for capacity building and training
• and the Public Engagement and Outreach Service

Each service is described here after along these two categories: Upstream and Downstream Services. They are not all necessarily running with the same readiness level of operations as some of them are more recent. In the medium term, EMSO ERIC will develop thematic services aligned with EU priorities and institutional scientific priorities, of which one service that will contribute to the study of the impacts of climate change. As the community of EMSO ERIC identified the most urgent scientific questions and needs, efforts and actions will be oriented to support the achievement of new knowledge and to lay the groundwork for the expansion of the service portfolio. EMSO reference community converged round the following scientific objectives recognised as urgent:

• Understand the distribution and behavior of different invasive species in the European Seas, especially in the Mediterranean;
• Understand ecosystem characteristics in sites (e.g., the Black Sea);
• Understand the interaction between geosphere and hydrosphere in the context of the marine geo-hazards;
• Investigate the ocean noise on a broader frequency range to discriminate the sources and assess the impact of anthropic noise on marine life.