Components of EMECO

The location of a selection of North Sea monitoring and operational programmes is shown below to illustrate the potential building blocks of EMECO. These include repeated observations ranging from those undertaken as part of national marine monitoring programmes, long-term monitoring undertaken by the continuous plankton recorder (CPR) survey, FerryBox routes and fixed point observations recorded from an array of buoys. Measurements include a range of physical, chemical and biological variables. The examples shown in the figure below are not a complete picture of all North Sea monitoring but serve to illustrate the comprehensive spatial coverage of a selected range of in situ observations.

Map showing a selection of locations where repeated observations are carried out either from ships, including the CPR survey routes and from fixed points. The latter includes data buoys as well as fixed platforms including oil and gas platforms.