CONNECT – Local coastal monitoring service for Portugal

Abstract

CONNECT provides a local, high-resolution, coastal monitoring service. It integrates model-based forecasts and observations to provide physical and biogeochemical data on Portuguese estuaries. The service is demonstrated in two use cases, the Tagus estuary and the Mondego estuary. Coastal areas provide multiple ecosystem services and are key for the blue economy. These systems harbor ecologically important habitats for fish, shellfish and birds, act as buffers for nutrient and contaminant loads entering the ocean, and support diverse human activities. The increasing human activities in coastal areas, coupled with the impacts of climate change, are rising the hazards within these systems. As a result, quantifying and anticipating how human-induced or climate-driven factors influence coastal systems has become essential to support their sustainable management and to meet the objectives of environmental directives and policies. CONNECT offers a shelf-to-estuary-river, high-resolution, coastal monitoring service that integrates model-based forecasts and observations. It provides physical and biogeochemical data on Portuguese estuaries to the Copernicus Marine Service (CMEMS), enhancing the management, monitoring and forecasting of water quality and coastal inundation. This service integrates two operational coastal data infrastructures: • the UBEST coastal observatory (Rodrigues et al., 2021; https://ubest.lnec.pt) that focuses primarily on model forecasts partly forced by CMEMS regional models. • the CoastNet monitoring infrastructure (Castellanos et al. 2021; França et al. 2021; https://coastnet.pt) that provides near real-time observations from in-situ sensors, and remote sensing data mainly from CMEMS. By combining complementary sources of information, the integrated service: i) enhances confidence in both the model results and the observations by allowing automatic cross-comparison of data sources; ii) fosters the early detection of numerical and measurement anomalies (e.g., drifting time series due to biofouling); iii) trengthens the robustness by creating redundancy in the data access; iv) promotes the adoption of common formats and a seamless integration with CMEMS; v) simplifies the extension to other coastal systems, given the adaptability and transferability of the underlying service. The new integrated service strengthens the support of the implementation of the Water Framework Directive (WFD), the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD), the Floods Directive (FD), and other EU policies, such as the Green Deal, by providing further and integrated historical and real-time information on physics and biogeochemistry. This paper describes the main characteristics of the CONNECT coastal service (section 2) and its use cases, in particular the demonstration of the service in the Tagus and Mondego estuaries (section 3). Final remarks are presented in section 4.