The ocean covers about 70% of earth’s surface. It provides us with key resources such as food, energy and materials, transport, recreational services and regulates weather and climate. A growing and more affluent population increases the environmental pressure on the ocean due to climate change, over exploitation, coastal build up, habitat destruction and pollution. Moreover, there is a growing demand for those marine ecosystem service and the desire to grow an ocean blue-green economy.
An integrated, effective, sustainable, and purposeful in-situ and satellite ocean observing system is needed to document, understand and possibly predict the ocean. Ocean information is critical to record change, facilitate timely warning of ocean-based hazards, initialize ocean system models for weather, climate and environmental forecasting, and to provide knowledge on the ocean dimension of sustainable development, the potential of the blue-green ocean economy and ocean protection and restoration.
So far, Atlantic Ocean observation was undertaken through loosely coordinated, in-situ observing networks, satellite observations and their data management arrangements remain heterogeneous. Thus, there is tremendous opportunity to advance and integrate the systems towards a fully integrated System. While the overall architecture, best practices, essential ocean variables are best articulated at the global level i.e. through the Global Ocean Observing System (GOOS) and the Blue Planet initiative of the Group on Earth Observations (GEO), implementation actions are more efficiently coordinated at the basin scale.
The EU Horizon 2020 project AtlantOS contributed to the above-mentioned challenges by focusing on the Altantic Ocean basin. The project pooled the expertise and work of 57 European and 5 non-European partners (research institutes, universities, marine service providers, multi-institutional organisations, and the private sector) from 18 countries.
