Copernicus Marine Service Ocean State Report, Issue 5

The first operational phase 2014–2021 of the Copernicus Marine Service has successfully implemented a unique European Union ocean monitoring and forecasting service (https://marine.copernicus.eu/). Thirty thousand expert downstream services and users are now connected to the service that responds to public and private user needs and policies related to all marine and maritime sectors: maritime safety, coastal environment monitoring, trade and marine navigation, fishery, aquaculture, marine renewable energy, marine conservation and biodiversity, ocean health, climate and climate adaptation, recreation, education, science and innovation. The Copernicus Marine Service organises the value chain that goes from observation to information (Le Traon et al. ) and is an essential tool for Ocean Governance (Section 1.4) and sustainable management of the ocean based on comprehensive ocean monitoring and forecasting capabilities.

The Copernicus Marine Service is unique by its coverage and comprehensiveness, its balance between state-of-the-art science and operational commitments, and the consistency of its portfolio where satellite observations, in situ observations, and model simulations are used coherently to describe the physical (blue), biogeochemical (green) ocean and sea-ice (white) state the European regional seas and the global ocean. The Copernicus Marine Service gathers a strong network of European ocean information producers. Thanks to a well-established and organised evolutions of the Copernicus Marine Service system of systems, the capabilities to operate a marine service responsive to user needs and scientific/technological advances have fully been demonstrated (CMEMS General Assembly ). The product and service portfolios have evolved from 2015 to 2021 with, in particular, the integration of new parameters (e.g. waves, carbon, turbidity, sea ice thickness and icebergs), the improvement of resolution and quality, longer time series, the full uptake of Sentinel missions (S1, S3 and recently S2) and the development of new means to access and visualise the data.

The Copernicus Marine Service provides invaluable observation and model products to assess and report on past and present marine environmental conditions and to analyse and interpret changes and trends in the marine environment as for example discussed in previous Ocean State Reports, https://marine.copernicus.eu/access-data/ocean-state-report, and as part of the Ocean Monitoring Indicator framework, https://marine.copernicus.eu/access-data/ocean-monitoring-indicators. The CMEMS Ocean State Reports and Ocean Monitoring Indicators provide, in particular, a unique ocean monitoring dashboard for policy and decision makers as well as for the general public to support actions and assess progresses in policy implementation. There have been excellent feedbacks on the annual Ocean State Reports and their high level summaries that are now part of the EU ocean state assessment landscape and provide a high visibility of the Copernicus Marine Service. They have also federated a unique pooling of EU scientific expertise to assess the state of the ocean based on the Copernicus Marine Service ocean monitoring products.

A remaining challege is to establish a comprehensive monitoring of the ocean, a challenge that demands international cooperation. In response, the Copernicus Marine Service has set up important partnerships with GOOS, OceanPredict, GEO and GEO Blue Planet. The UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development (https://www.oceandecade.org/) will be a unique opportunity to develop further the required international cooperation to support delivery of the information, action and solutions needed to achieve the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.