The ESA Ocean Science Cluster is an emerging concept whose objective is to promote collaborative research among the different projects and scientific activities ESA has been investing in the recent years, with the objective to enhance our observing capability and scientific understanding of the oceans and coastal regions. This new concept is to be supported by a number of research opportunities and networking actions in order to bring together different expertise, data and resources and ensure that the final result is bigger than the sum of the parts.
The present ESA Ocean Science Cluster ITT is a first step to bring the cluster to life, through the launch of two separate and independent contracts which will be run in parallel and address the following Themes:
- Theme 1: Ocean Carbon Budget: The main objective of this project is to produce an integrated, satellite-based budget of pools and fluxes of carbon in the ocean, and further understand its variability in space and time.
- Theme 2: Ocean Health: The main objective of this project is to advance our monitoring capability and scientific understanding of the impact of multi stressors events on Ocean Health.
For each of these Themes, the aim is to bring the present and past ESA and other European developments together with any relevant new results in the community (national funding, EC projects) into a holistic exercise aiming at:
(i) Contributing to develop the next generation of satellite products and observation systems over the oceans and seas with special attention to address fundamental observation gaps to better characterise the complex processes relevant to each specific theme.
(ii) Capitalising on novel EO capabilities to address major knowledge gaps in ocean sciences
(iii) Assessing the feasibility of transferring the novel science results into innovative solutions and decision support systems for society
(iv) Contributing to the establishment of a coordinated European research area on the selected theme.
This activity also contributes to the joint EC-ESA Earth System Science Initiative launched in February 2020 by the European Space Agency and the European Commission (EC) Directorate-General for Research and Innovation (DG RI) to jointly advance Earth System Science and its response to the global challenges that society is facing in the onset of this century.
Learn more about this Invitation To Tender on the esa-star Publication page.