Marine Environmental Indicators
This Blue-Cloud 2026 Virtual Lab will allow users to monitor and assess the environmental status of marine areas and support the decision-making process for the ocean management. Multiple data sources will be exploited in a unique data analysis service, which will allow the online computation of indicators. Functionalities developed in the pilot Blue-Cloud will be improved, including new data sources and new algorithms.
The tool will calculate online Metocean information and indicators on the environmental quality of the Mediterranean Sea and Global Ocean, using input from Blue Data Infrastructures (BDIs), also improving uncertainty evaluation. A set of Metocean environmental indicators will be defined according to available datasets from BDIs. For each indicator, an analysis and production workflow will be implemented, or further developed and tested, applying big data analysis methods on the multi-disciplinary data sets.
The objectives of this demonstrator are to:
- Calculate and distribute online information and indicators on the environmental quality of the marine area.
- Obtain new added-value data applying big data analysis and machine learning methods on multi-source data sets.
- Enable users to perform online and on-the-fly operations, such as selecting a portion of a dataset, to perform statistical analysis or display the data.
The target audience of the service includes intermediate users such as environmental protection agencies, and international stakeholders in the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD), in the UN Sustainable Development Goal 14 "Life below water", and in the Blue Economy.
The service offers to them a flexible capacity to perform statistical analyses of the quality and characteristics of the marine environment for the Mediterranean Sea region, with the possibility to scale in the next version up to the Global Ocean.
Attention is also dedicated to scientific users, providing to them a tool to facilitate the discovery of new climatic indicators based on machine learning, and a simplified way to analyse oceanographic data.
Services
The Marine Environmental Indicators (MEI) Generator service is a web graphical interface for the exploitation of multiple data sources with multiple algorithms, that allows the user to generate and display value-added environmental data from generic marine data.
Ocean Patterns and Ocean Regimes indicators are based on machine learning methods. They consist in applying an unsupervised classification to profiles or time-series. Data are automatically gathered into clusters, depending on their vertical or temporal structure. When analysing the different clusters, spatial or temporal coherence can be revealed.
The SSI service calculates maps and time series of exceptional atmospheric wind or storm circumstances. Individual storms (Event SSI) and specific areas (Area SSI) can be calculated for a given time period and time step (for time series). Wind speed threshold data are used to relate the storm severity to specific impact (e.g. sea circulation, coastal damage).
The service provides information on how to use ERDDAP servers to access and retrieve subsets of inorganic carbon data in their preferred format, removing the need to download large file(s) that the user may not be interested in.