Blue-Cloud 2026 Ocean Observers Webinars - Coastal currents from observations

This webinar series introduces the services and Virtual Labs developed within Blue-Cloud 2026, to the EuroGOOS community. It highlights how Blue-Cloud supports marine research and innovation through integrated data access, cloud-based analytical tools, and collaborative Virtual Labs.

Participants will explore the Blue-Cloud services and VLab environment, discover practical use cases, and learn how to access and work with integrated marine datasets.

The Coastal Currents from Observations Virtual Lab in Blue-Cloud 2026 enables users to generate integrated ocean surface current maps by merging data from multiple sources. It uses direct and indirect current measurements, including High Frequency (HF) radar, drifter observations, and geostrophic currents derived from satellite altimetry. The integration relies on the DIVAnd (Data Interpolating Variational Analysis in n dimensions) method, which applies physical constraints such as coastline boundaries, horizontal divergence, and momentum balance to improve the reliability of the output.

The main feature of the Virtual Lab is a customisable service delivered through Jupyter notebooks. Users can select a coastal region—depending on data availability and the extent of HF radar coverage, typically ranging from 50 to 200 km offshore—and produce gridded surface current maps in NetCDF format. These maps support Lagrangian simulations, allowing the visualisation of artificial drifter trajectories from user-defined release points. The output also serves as input for the MEDSLIK-II oil spill model, which will be deployed in a Docker container to simulate pollutant dispersion scenarios.

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