The company
As an entrusted entity
After running the European MyOcean projects since 2009, Mercator Ocean was officially appointed by the European Commission on November 11th, 2014 to implement the European ocean-monitoring service, the Copernicus Marine Service (CMEMS), as part of the European Earth observation programme, Copernicus. It is an unprecedented service, free, and open to all, accessible via a web portal that now serves about 30 000 intermediate users around the world. Having sufficient knowledge to be able to describe and forecast, among other ocean parameters, temperature, currents, salinity, the thickness of sea ice in all the oceans of the world, above and below the surface, but also their oxygen content, pH, nutrients and plankton gives the world a decisive operational capacity for scientific research, the protection of citizens and for the sustainable management of the ocean and development of the blue economy (marine energy, safety at sea and maritime routing, fishery and aquaculture management, etc). This delegation agreement covers EUR 147 million from 2014 to 2021.
MOi is also in charge together with EUMETSAT, ECMWF and the European Environment Agency (EEA) of the implementation of the WEkEO DIAS cloud computing platform. And MOi also brings its expertise in a new frontier of international ocean governance by coordinating the EU4OceanObs project.
Our Director General, Pierre Bahurel is the Chair of ETOOFS (Expert Team on Operational Oceanography and Forecasting Systems) which is an international group of GOOS (Global Ocean Observation Systems) and IOC-UNESCO. It works to create standards and best-practices for operational oceanography and to democratise this information and knowledge for global use.