Mercator OceanOrganisation		Board of Administration | Project team | Scientific advisory board | GMMC

The project team which is at the heart of the Mercator system

Mercator project team

The project team designs, develops, qualifies and implements the Mercator system to meet the requirements defined by the member organisations of the GIP. The team works at the headquarters of the GIP in the Parc Technologique du Canal in Ramonville near to Toulouse and employs forty people including engineers, researchers or technicians.

The project team is organised into groups around various activities :

• The Research and development group which is in charge of upstream studies whose results are used directly for designing the system and its prototypes and for validating scientific results of operational systems.

• The Systems development and integration group which is responsible for specifying the whole of the Mercator system, for producing the various elements, for integrating them and for implementing the various prototypes leading up to an operational system.

• The Real time operations group which draws up real-time forecasting bulletins which are distributed each week.

• TheValidation group which is in charge of validating output from the models.

• The User services group which is responsible for computer architecture and computer solutions.

• The systems and networks group which is responsible for computer architecture and computer solutions.

In order to contribute to integrated operational oceanography, to guarantee the expected scientific performances for the Mercator system for the short term (development) and for the long term (operations), the project organisation has to mesh perfectly with the development activity run by the project team and a more extensive network of oceanography know-how which is not subject to the same restrictions on its goals.

The supporting research conducted by the oceanography community (or "blue link") which is to contribute towards Mercator is led by the Mercator/Coriolis mission group. To achieve its study and development tasks, the project team can call on one of the teams in this network for specific know-how on a particular point needed for short term development. In this case, there is direct interaction between the project and the team which receives support for the specific task.