Taking full advantage of the Copernicus Marine Service’s near-real-time capabilities and coverage, Planetek Italia has developed Rheticus® Marine, an innovative, high-performing, operational geoinformation service for monitoring coastal water quality.

Rheticus® Marine provides updated information daily, 10-daily, monthly and in user-specified time intervals, for all four water quality parameters: Chlorophyll-a, Sea Surface Temperature, Turbidity, and Water Transparency. User-specified intervals are produced on-demand; all other statistics are generated automatically.

Rheticus® Marine supports national and regional authorities in fulfilling environmental reporting obligations (e.g. Water Framework Directive, Marine Strategy Framework Directive) and private actors involved in marine resource exploitation activities. Near-real-time maps and statistics on parameters linked to eutrophication, such as chlorophyll, turbidity and transparency are provided both automatically and on-demand.

Industry sectors:

• Environmental Reporting
• Maritime Engineering
• Fisheries & Aquaculture

All services are provided through a cloud-based platform and the information provided is the result of automatic processing of Copernicus Marine Service products.

The Rheticus® Marine service, generated with CMEMS' Copernicus data, is the result of the project "User uptake activities Copernicus Marine Environment Service (CMEMS). Promoting demonstrations of CMEMS downstream services.", which is coordinated by Mercator Ocean. In the framework of implementing and operating the Copernicus Marine Service, Mercator Ocean aims to keep delivering and maintaining a competitive and state-of-the-art European service responding to public and private intermediate user needs. Rheticus® Marine has been selected as one of the operational services to demonstrate Copernicus Marine Environment Service products in the Mediterranean sea (Lot 10 Med-Sea).

Rheticus® Marine is fuelled by streams of information from the Copernicus Marine Service.

The Copernicus Marine Service provides “streamlined” satellite data, processed to a high level (Level 3), which is partly what makes Rheticus® Marine so fast. Using raw satellite data (Level 1) would require far more computational power, storage and bandwidth. Copernicus Marine Service products are “sensor-agnostic” (independent of the specific satellite sensor data used in their production), and they have undergone rigorous quality and validation processes, providing clear information about the accuracy of the parameters measured.

Taking full advantage of the Copernicus Marine Service’s near-real-time capabilities and coverage, Rheticus® Marine uses specialised regional algorithms to deliver a wider range of water quality parameters (e.g. turbidity and water transparency), which can be more easily compared with local data collected by regional authorities.

Rheticus® Marine makes use of the following products from the Copernicus Marine Environment Monitoring Service:

• Sea surface chlorophyll from multiple satellites
• Sea surface temperature (high and ultra-high resolution) from multiple satellites
• Remote sensing reflectance and attenuation coefficient at 490nm from multiple satellites

Features:

• Near-real-time coastal water quality monitoring at 1km resolution: Rheticus® Marine ensures a steady flow of fresh data round the clock, allowing rapid responses to phenomena such as pollution events or algal blooms.
• Easy visualization and mapping: Rheticus® Marine allows water quality parameters to be visualised through a user-friendly web interface which allows time travel and custom area selection, and is accessible from multiple devices.
• Automatic cloud-based geo-information service platform: Rheticus® Marine is built on Rheticus® – a cloud-based data and services hub which automates complex processing chains to deliver services regularly, rapidly and reliably.
• Maximum interoperability: Rheticus® Marine allows access to both internal and external resources (data sources, processing modules or external catalogues) and presents the results through a single access point.

The services provided by Rheticus® Marine and generated with Copernicus Marine Environment Monitoring Service products are free to use.

Visit the free demo portal to see the service in action!

Rheticus® Marine is an operational commercial service provided by Planetek and is built on Rheticus®, its a cloud-based data and services hub. For information about further services available and service subscription and pricing, please contact us.