ALBERT

Beschreibung: Report on European glider network coordination (Best Practices, OceanGliders, metadata and data management

Beschreibung: This report provides recommendations to foster collaboration and cooperation between technologies and disciplines and for implementing truly integrated ocean observing systems. Based on an intensive literature review and a careful examination of different examples of integration in different fields, this work identifies the issues and barriers that must be addressed, and proposes a vision for a real implementation of this ocean integration ambition. This work is a contribution to the implementation of EOOS, a much-needed step forward in Europe, following the international guidance of GOOS.

Beschreibung: EuroSea is a holistic large-scale project encompassing the full value chain of marine knowledge, from observations to modelling and forecasting and to user-focused services. This report summarizes the legacy of EuroSea as planned and measured through a dedicated impact monitoring protocol, a holistic assessment of the project's successes in advancing and integrating European ocean observing and forecasting systems. Since its start, EuroSea has been analysing how well the project progresses towards the identified areas of impact. Impact assessment is not performance evaluation. These terms overlap but are distinct: performance relates to the efficient use of resources; impact relates to the transformative effect on the users. The EuroSea legacy report is presented through an aggregation and analysis of the EuroSea work towards achieving its impacts. Overall, over 100 impacts have been identified and presented on the website and in a stand-alone impact report. The legacy report sheds light on 32 most powerful impacts (four impacts in each of the eight EuroSea impact areas). EuroSea Impact Areas: 1. Strengthen the European Ocean Observing System (EOOS), support the Global Ocean Observing System (GOOS) and the GOOS Regional Alliances; 2. Increase ocean data sharing and integration; 3. Deliver improved climate change predictions; 4. Build capacity, internally in EuroSea and externally with EuroSea users, in a range of key areas; 5. Develop innovations, including exploitation of novel ideas or concepts; shorten the time span between research and innovation and foster economic value in the blue economy; 6. Facilitate methodologies, best practices, and knowledge transfer in ocean observing and forecasting; 7. Contribute to policy making in research, innovation, and technology; 8. Raise awareness of the need for a fit for purpose, sustained, observing and forecasting system in Europe. Ocean observing and forecasting is a complex activity brining about a variety of technologies, human expertise, in water and remote sensing measurements, high-volume computing and artificial intelligence, and a high degree of governance and coordination. Determining an impact on a user type or an area, therefore, requires a holistic assessment and a clear strategic overview. The EuroSea impact monitoring protocol has been the first known such attempt in a European ocean observing and forecasting project. The project’s progress has been followed according to the identified impact areas, through consortium workshops, stakeholder webinars, tracking, and reporting. At the end of EuroSea, we are able to demonstrate how well we have responded to the European policy drivers set out in the funding call and the grant agreement of our project, signed between the European Commission and 53 organizations, members of the EuroSea consortium. The project's impact is diverse, spanning areas from strengthening ocean observing governance to contributing to policymaking or boosting ocean research, innovation, and technology. Each impact area underscores EuroSea's commitment to a sustainable and informed approach to ocean observing and forecasting for enhanced marine knowledge and science-based sustainable blue economy and policies.

Beschreibung: Tide gauge metadata catalogue V1.0 (EU-TGN or European and adjacent areas Tide Gauge Network Inventory); accuracy and precision review of the EuroGOOS Tide Gauge Task Team (TGTT) database of permanent monitoring nodes for European and adjacent coastlines. A metadata catalogue of all permanent, managed tide level monitoring stations across Europe and adjacent coastlines, including North Africa.

Beschreibung: This deliverable provides an overview of EuroSea outcomes related to interior ocean carbon variability in deep convection areas in order to assess the linkage of these processes for the use in national climate action (NCA) plans delivered in the framework of the Paris Agreement. In summary, large-scale connectivity in the ocean does not allow clear delineation of patterns of regional carbon uptake across national boundaries, limiting an assessment of the Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZ) in light of NCA plans. This problem becomes already clear by a simple scale estimation: considering sluggish, open ocean (away from continental boundaries) advection speeds of 2 cm/s result in a “relocation” of any water parcel by roughly 630 km per year (or 3150 km in 5 years Paris Agreement carbon auditing period) and crossing national borders easily. Knowing changes in the global ocean carbon uptake is of great importance for the preparation of NCA plans. This is because the NCA plans are motivated by the globally averaged atmospheric CO2 concentration, which is the sum of all sources and sinks and including the ocean sink. In case of decrease in the oceanic sink (e.g., IPCC, 2021), more CO2 will remain in the atmosphere and consequently nations will need to formulate their NCA plans with increased ambition in order to meet the CO2 target defined in the Paris Agreement. In this deliverable key approaches for the assessment of the global ocean carbon uptake have been applied to ocean areas. The observational requirements for applying statistical approaches (i.e., artificial neural networks, Fourrier et al., 2020) to reconstruct dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC) from oxygen, nutrient and hydrographic data are analysed. It is shown that even small changes in the DIC content determined in this way can be linked to anthropogenic increases in atmospheric carbon (Cant). Furthermore, it has been shown that multilinear regression techniques can be used to produce maps of ocean surface carbon fluxes at very high spatial resolution, which in turn can provide a much more accurate estimate of regional CO2 uptake (or release). Finally, a quantification of the redistribution of dissolved gases in boundary current systems could be investigated by following recommendations for observational methods stemming from this deliverable. This deliverable recommends improvement of carbon sampling in all nations EEZ regions and following global standards. Because the objective targets a global assessment, the data must be disseminated rapidly and in a FAIR fashion to enable further global integration (e.g., global carbon budget). A need for defining responsibilities for such global integration and the resourcing is required. It is recommended to make use of statistical methods to create surface and interior carbon parameter distributions via multiparameter approaches with a sufficient amount of reference data (e.g., co-located DIC, oxygen, nutrients, chlorophyll-a, hydrography). In the light of the ongoing crisis related to global availability of the Certified Reference Materials (CRMs) for carbonate system measurements, provision of European-produced material becomes critical to enable traceability of future measurements. Nations should be encouraged to provide appropriate resources by means of corresponding European directives. Example for such national commitments is the collection of reference data in the framework of the Common Fisheries Policy.

Beschreibung: Currently, the ocean carbon sink annually removes about a third of anthropogenic fossil fuel and industrial CO2 emissions, reducing therefore climate change damages and CO2 abatement costs. While the land sinks have entered climate policies, the ocean sink has not—for good reasons since the former stores carbon within the boundaries of a state while the ocean removes carbon from the atmosphere rather in its property as a global common. However, the question remains what is the value of the ocean carbon sink and should it be differently attributed when comparing a coastal state with a large exclusive economic zone (EEZ) compared to landlocked state. Here, we demonstrate different approaches to value the ocean sink, comparing a climate-change damage-based approach with an abatement, market-based approach. We use a high-resolution carbon flux dataset (0.25x0.25 degree) to estimate the ocean carbon sink and source in coastal areas. We assign a net sink of 1.72 GtC proportional to countries with negative carbon fluxes in their EEZ. In our calculation the annual value of the global ocean sink ranges from 61.19 B USD (Std 31.80), equivalent to the 2021 GDP of Slovenia, to 1433 B USD (Std 94.30), equivalent to the 2021 GDP of Spain (World Bank data) for the abatement cost-based assessment approach (assuming full emission trading and low ambition levels in the national determined contribution) and for the climate-change damage-based assessment approach relying on an upper value of the social cost of carbon in our investigation. By breaking down the carbon sink by nations EEZ we estimate which countries are the largest donors of ocean carbon wealth and which countries would be affected the most if a weakening of the ocean sink would need to be compensated by higher emission reduction levels.

Beschreibung: This deliverable presents the Final Assessment of the observation and thematic networks as those represented in work package 3 of EuroSea, taking as a reference the information on Deliverable 3.2 Observing Network Initial Assessment. Following the same approach with D3.2 the original questionnaire was modified accordingly in order to depict the progress made on the same Network Attributes, Commitments and Benefits following the GOOS, OCG guidelines. The unforeseen COVID-19 pandemic had significant effects upon WP3 activities since the main mechanism foreseen to advance progress within the different networks was the organization of in person workshops. Moreover, adequate funds were allocated towards this in order to promote inclusivity and participation. Adapting to the new situation the first series of workshops had to be changed into online only events which despite the inherent difficulty, proved to have significant advantages as well. In particular they gave the opportunity for a significant number of people to join from all around the globe and participate in the events (for example the Sea Level WS). Another challenge proved to be the variability within some networks with sub-components or sub-groups having significantly different characteristics. In particular Eulerian platforms comprise a wide range of platforms - fixed moorings, surface buoys, cable bottom platforms - with some of them being part of mature and well-developed networks (OceanSITES, EMSO etc) while other are loose partners of on-going programs and projects (JERICO RI, coastal buoys). EuroSea activities had a significant positive impact on all the observing and thematic networks, actively promoting synergies and collaboration, with most of them successfully reaching Framework Processes Readiness Criteria Level 7 and above. Although progress at many different aspects must continue beyond EuroSea, it is important that the framework has been set. It is thus suggested that an annual evaluation/assessment process for each network/task team is adopted within EuroGOOS. By going through this exercise annually, each EuroGOOS Task Team (observing network) will be able to describe its current state, assess progress and most importantly to define next targets and priorities.