Most of the marine economy sector relies on human activities taking place at the ocean surface:  maritime transport, fisheries, oil & gas exploitation, maritime tourism. For protecting marine and coastal environments, while ensuring safe activities at the ocean surface, drift modelling estimation constitutes an efficient decision tool.

Since 2009, CLS (Collecte Localisation Satellites) has developed and maintains a suite of drift models named MOBIDRIFT, allowing the simulation of object drift at sea. It addresses several types of applications thanks to four specific modules: icebergs, particles (oil spill, algae, litter), search & rescue and containers. This drift model suite is forced by environmental data to calculate the impact on the modelled object.

The objective of the Oceanic Drift Models pilot is to take advantage of the NextGEOSS platform to enhance the actual service by:

1. Using the NextGEOSS data hub to access the environmental products of the Copernicus marine core service and the CLS Datastore for preparing the environmental forcing fields
2. Taking advantage of the NextGEOSS cloud infrastructure to improve the performance of the drift model and allow ensemble model simulation
3. Allow access to the end-user to a scalable service of object drift at sea through a simple web-based application

The online-drift service can be applied to the case of sargassum algae in the French Caribbean, the plastic in the Mediterranean Sea, or the icebergs in the Antarctic Ocean.