EMODnet & CMEMS together to build a framework for improving land boundary conditions in CMEMS regional products
Funded by the Copernicus Marine Environment Monitoring Service (CMEMS) under the service evolution programme (2018 – 2020), the LAMBDA (LAnd-Marine Boundary Development and Analysis) project aims to improve the thermohaline circulation in coastal areas of two CMEMS Monitoring Forecasting Centres through a better characterisation of the land-marine boundary conditions, with special regard to the salinity fields, by exploring the capacities of watershed numerical modelling and its coupling to mesoscale regional ocean models.
Currently coupling hydrological models to coastal/regional ocean models is not a general practice because, even if regarded as a powerful and useful tool, they do not fully accomplish to estimate accurately the right volume of water reaching the coastal zone for many reasons including water management activities such as human consumption, irrigation, etc. For this reason, many coastal and ocean models continue to use river climatologies as boundary conditions for representing such an complex boundary.
The EMODnet River data service provided by EMODnet Physics will support the LAMBDA project to demonstrate the quality of modelling results produced by the watershed models. The EMODnet Physics - River data service provides a unique one stop shop for operational near real time river data in a standardised format for several countries facilitating the access, download and validation of this kind of data.
The river service provided by the EMODnet Physics will be used by the LAMBDA project consortium which is composed by 4 full members Instituto Superior Técnico - IST (Portugal), Bentley systems (Portugal), Barcelona Expert Center (Spain) and ETT (Italy) and by 4 associated partners: MetOffice (UK), Puertos del Estado (Spain), Marine Institute (Ireland) and Helmholtz-Zentrum Geesthacht (Germany).
Therefore, the EMODnet river service will enhance CMEMS by aiding in watershed models validation and quality control thus improving their forecast services.
About the LAMBDA project
The LAMBDA (LAnd-Marine Boundary Development and Analysis) project is a two year project funded by the Copernicus Marine Environment Monitoring Service (CMEMS) under the service evolution programme (2018 – 2020). The project is coordinated by the Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), one of the largest and most reputed school of Engineering, Science and Technology in Portugal. In particular, the project leverages on the MARETEC centre (the Research Centre of IST for Marine, Environment and Technology) expertise in developing, implementing, validating and providing forecasts for ocean, coastal and watersheds hydrodynamic and ecological processes by means of numerical models.
References
www.mercator-ocean.fr/en/portfolio/lambda
www.cmems-lambda.eu