Half of the world’s population lives within 100 km of the coasts! Tourism, coastal development, port industries, prevention of pollution and unforeseeable climatic disasters, aquaculture, etc.
These are just some of the many activities where there is an increasing demand for precise, real time information about sea conditions. Coastal models can now respond to this demand. These models, which describe and forecast small-scale coastal phenomena (from a kilometre down to around one hundred metres), require large-scale (ie: oceanic basin, global) operational models such as Mercator to provide their initial and boundary conditions. Mercator thus aids several coastal modelling teams, not only for the French members of the public interest group (CNRS, Ifremer, IRD, SHOM) but also elsewhere in Europe (Spain, Portugal, Denmark, Ireland) and even one American university.