The European Multidisciplinary Seafloor and Water-Column Observatory to explore the Ocean

EMSO ERIC consists of a system of regional facilities placed at key sites around Europe, from North East to the Atlantic, through the Mediterranean, to the Black Sea. Observatories are platforms equipped with multiple sensors, placed along the water column and on the seafloor. They constantly measure different biogeochemical and physical parameters that address natural hazards, climate change and marine ecosystems. 

In a nutshell, the challenge EMSO ERIC is trying to solve is to provide access to curated data and offer high-quality services to a large and diverse group of users, from scientists and industries to institutions and policymakers, for defining environmental policies based on scientific data. A fundamental technical component of the EMSO ERIC cyber-infrastructure, that allows the integration of data from EMSO regional facilities where the observatories are deployed, is the EMSO ERIC Data Platform. This Data Platform has been designed to be scalable, flexible and able to provide high-quality data products for a growing set of stakeholders in a wide range of disciplines. From the technical perspective, the platform ingests, consolidates, processes and archives data, integrates the data management architectures of the regionally distributed EMSO nodes and makes data available to the community. 

To support this challenge, EGI contributed to operating different EMSO ERIC services including the data portal which received thousands of visits from different countries.