Venice: A meeting of minds

Last month, Mark Lawless (JBA Director), Martin Williams (Technical Director, Marine and Coastal) and I (Heather Norton, Software Developer) flew to Venice to attend a project workshop for the Copernicus C3S Contract, part of the EU’s Copernicus programme. We were joined by our fellow consortium members from Stichting Deltares (Netherlands), Danish Meteorological Institute (Denmark), National Research Council - Institute of Marine Sciences (Italy) and University College Cork (Ireland).

As part of the Contract, each consortium member is tasked with considering how metocean conditions will impact operations within a range of marine industries. Over the past few months, the project team has engaged with stakeholders from sectors including the offshore wind, ports and harbours and coastal municipalities to gather intelligence on their current and future metocean concerns. The purpose of the workshop was to pull together this intelligence to help steer the development of the climate data service that will result from the Copernicus C3S Contract.

Copernicus C3S project workshop

After successfully navigating Venice’s beautiful and baffling canal system, we arrived at the workshop venue for a day of discussion and debate. It soon became clear that the stakeholder engagement conducted over the past few months was extremely diverse, both in terms of the environments in which the stakeholders operate and in terms of the way in which they conduct their operations. No two coastlines are alike, and no two organisations operate in the same way. As we progress onto the next phase of Copernicus C32, it is essential that this diversity is captured, allowing users to run their own calculations to match their own specific circumstances.

Reflecting on the main findings from the workshop, it is satisfying to know that we were able to reach a single vision for the project, allowing us to plan cohesively for the next stage of the project. The Copernicus C3S Contract is ambitious in scale both in terms of the geographical spread of the consortium members and the European wide coverage of the project outputs. To be part of such an ambitious and cohesive project is inspiring as we move onto the next phase and apply our ForeCoast® Marine software to consider the impact of climate change on Europe’s diverse and multifaceted marine industries.