Black Sea GOOS

Description of the infrastructure: NOMOS is a system designed to allow the real-time assessment of weather and marine conditions in the western part of Black Sea. It consists of several subsystems. The main goal of NOMOS is to support sustainable development of the Bulgarian Black Sea coast and EEZ. The proposed NOMOS’s installations within JERICO-NEXT project are:

• Installation 1, Galata platform is located in western part of the Black Sea on the Bulgarian shelf 26 km east from the city of Varna. The measuring system comprises a weather station, water temperature, conductivity, DO, pH, chlorophyll sensors and ADCP.
• Installation 2, Port Operational Marine Observing System is a network of distributed sensors and centralized data collecting, processing and distributing unit. The parameters measured by POMOS are: wind speed and direction, temperature, humidity, atmospheric pressure, visibility, solar radiation, water temperature and salinity, sea level, currents speed and direction, significant wave height.
• Installation 3, Shkorpilovci coastal station is located about 40 km south from Varna. The measuring system consists of weather station, sea level gauge, UV radiation, total solar radiation sensors and ADCP on 18 depth.
• Installation 4, BulSel is the Bulgarian sea level service. The system is equipped with MIROS and VEGA plus altimeters. NOMOS tries to envisage the strategy to connect operational oceanography data and products at different scales to applications that give reliable, scientifically controlled information to decision and policy makers in the Black Sea countries to decide prevention/adaptation/mitigation actions against the deterioration of the of the Black Sea environmental problems. Resolving conflicts between commerce, recreation, development, utilization of natural resources, and conservation in an informed, timely and cost-effective fashion requires a significant increase in our ability to monitor (nowcast) and forecast the Black Sea environment. MOMOS offered operational monitoring of the Western Black Sea to find better solution to conflicting issues, by supplying the scientifically correct information to wide range of beneficiary living and working in the Black Sea coastal area. Last but not least NOMOS can support the scientific studies of the Black Sea climate variability and change by increasing the availability of long time series of quality controlled data.

Services currently offered by the infrastructure: The service that we offer for the VA is a real time access to data of all or selected platforms and sensors. The majority of in situ data that are commonly used for monitoring of the Black Sea are based on near-shore monitoring programmes or irregular cruises that provide either non-synoptic, coarse resolution realizations of large scale processes or detailed, but time and site specific snapshots of local features. These gaps can be filled in by data obtained from real time observing infrastructures that provide information with sufficiently high temporal frequency. The information obtained from the NOMOS is wildly used by scientists from the Black Sea countries. The data are used for assimilation and validation of regional models (Kubryakov et al., 2011), assessment of the wind and wave climate of the region (Valchev et al. 2010) and validation of satellite products (Slabakova et al., 2009). Recent interest of NASA and JRC led to the installation of AERONET system of on the Galata platform which is part of the global AERONET-OC network component. Data is freely available thought the NASA web site http://aeronet.gsfc.nasa.gov. Parts of the NOMOS data are distributed thought the MyOcean and SeaDataNet data portals. In 2010 the registered users of the NOMOS reached 2100 users.

Support offered under this proposal: Data quality control, data analysis.