Ocean and Climate Early Warning Universal System Officially Launched
On October 24, the 2024 Global Ocean Development Forum was grandly convened in Qingdao. During the forum, the Ocean and Climate Early wArNing Universal System (OCEANUS), jointly set up by the Ocean to climate Seamless Forecasting system (OSF) Programme and the First Institute of Oceanography (FIO) of the Ministry of Natural Resources of China, was officially unveiled.
OCEANUS consists of four subsystems, namely the Global Ocean Numerical Forecast System, the Global Early Warning System for Coral Reef Bleaching, the Global Maritime Search and Rescue Forecast System and the Global Oil Spill Forecast System, with two new subsystems of typhoon forecast and climate prediction to be launched in the future. Based on China's core scientific and technological breakthroughs, the system stands out as a high-quality scientific and technological public service product provided by China through the United Nations Ocean Decade platform.
Under the framework of Ocean Decade, Researcher QIAO Fangli of FIO worked with experts and scholars from over 50 countries to jointly initiate the OSF Programme. As the Principal Scientist of the Programme, Prof. QIAO led the research team to develop non-breaking surface wave-induced mixing (Bv Theory) which revealed the key role of ocean waves in the air-sea heat and momentum flux, thus greatly improving the simulation accuracy for the upper ocean.
With data assimilation functionality provided by efficient parallel implementation of the ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF), OCEANUS is capable of assimilating multi-source ocean observation data, thus significantly improving data processing efficiency and forecast accuracy. By adopting the efficient parallel algorithm of an irregular quasi-rectangular domain decomposition, which could allow a near-absolute balanced load of the model, OCEANUS has efficiently improved the computing efficiency.
The Global Ocean Numerical Forecast System can provide forecasting products covering multiple ocean parameters, with a lead time of 120 hours, at a horizontal resolution of 0.1, and a temporal resolution of 3 hours. The original version of this system has been successfully applied in multiple search and rescue efforts such as the ship accident in Phuket, Thailand in 2018 and the search and rescue operation in the waters of Cambodia in 2021.
Based on the real-time motoring results of Coral Bleaching Hot Spot and Coral Bleaching Degree Heating Weeks, two key indicators for coral bleaching, the Global Early Warning System for Coral Reef Bleaching could provide real-time assessment and forecasting results of coral reef bleaching in global ocean, making scientific contributions to the protection of the coral reef ecosystem.
The Global Maritime Search and Rescue Forecast system can generate the historical distribution and trajectory of floating particles in the global ocean environment, thus providing important support for the tracking of marine pollutants and maritime search and rescue actions. The Global Oil Spill Forecast System can provide timely information to guarantee maritime safety by calculating key information such as the location, thickness, evaporation probability and proportion of spilled oil in the case of oil spills. It has played an important role in multiple oil spill accidents.
OCEANUS is revolutionary not only in overcoming a series of key scientific and technological problems, but also in bridging the gap between cutting-edge scientific research outcomes and people-oriented practical solutions, thus providing vital support for the realization of the expected outcomes of the Ocean Decade. In the future, OCEANUS will be improved by launching more subsystems and continuously provide high-quality scientific and technological public service products, contributing to the global ocean governance by offering Chinese wisdom and solutions.