Mercator Ocean	Organisation | History

Mercator Ocean : towards operational oceanography

As a routine service, in real time and on a global scale, close to our coastline or off-shore, on the surface of the ocean and in its depths, Mercator Ocean has to describe, explain and forecast, while always staying one ocean ahead.

Its mission

The Public Interest Group (GIP) Mercator Ocean was founded in April 2002 with a brief from its six member organisations to set up an operational system for describing the state of the ocean, an integral part of our environment, at any given time and at any place on our blue planet.

Input for the Mercator system comes from ocean observations measured by satellites or in situ observations through measurements taken at sea. These measurements are "ingested" (assimilated) by the analysis and forecasting model. The assimilation of observation data in a model is used to describe and forecast the state of the ocean for up to 14 days ahead of time.

The project mission was thus defined in 1995 to meet a threefold objective:

• Develop an operational oceanography system
• Enable the development of applications by distributing its products
• Contribute to success of the international Godae experiment along with the Jason (altimetry observation) and Coriolis (in situ observations) programmes.

For more information, click on the threefold objective.

To achieve this goal, Mercator Ocean is based on an original structure.

Mercator Ocean has now become an indispensable player in French operational oceanography. It has a strong institutional structure and a solid scientific basis and is firmly involved in the international context due to its many cooperative ventures; the Mercator ocean team is determinedly blazing trails towards tomorrow's oceanography .