16 - IFREMER

IFREMER was created by decree of 5 June 1984, it is the only French organisation with an entirely maritime purpose. It operates under the joint auspices of the Ministries of Education, Research and Technology, Fisheries and Amenities, Transport and Housing. Being involved in all the marine science and technology fields, IFREMER has the capability of solving different problems with an integrated approach. IFREMER scope of actions can be divided into four main areas, each of them including different topics: i) understanding, assessing, developing and managing the ocean resources, ii) improving knowledge, protection and restoration methods for marine environment, iii) production and management of equipment of national interest. Moreover, IFREMER undertakes to provide assistance to the government, public authorities and organisations concerned with the scientific, technical or economic research, gather, disseminate and enhance national and international oceanographic information, contribute to the implementation of international cooperation agreements in the marine field.

Specific Ocean Remote Sensing Activities relevant to INTAROS: In the framework of its activities in Observation and monitoring of the sea, IFREMER operates, since 1991, the “ Centre ERS d’Archivage et de Traitement”  (CERSAT) which   has evolved to a multi-satellite/multi-sensor data processing/geophysical product provider and data distribution center in close collaboration with the scientific teams of the Laboratoire d’Océanographie Spatiale. The laboratory has acquired a 20 year experience in Ocean and Sea ice data processing. It has developed specific scatterometer based geophysical products related to Ocean Winds and Sea ice monitoring using successively the ERS AMI-Wind, NSCAT, SeaWinds on QuikSCAT and ASCAT. The main sea ice studies concern sea ice type delineation and sea-ice drift. Validated data and geophysical products are available through the Ifremer web site. 

With their long-term time series of ocean parameters from satellites, Ifremer through the CERSAT archive center has a known robust observation data center with free, easy and open access to the data. Ifremer is or has been involved in many projects of development, validation, integration and dissemination (sharing) of the data, in particular in the Arctic (EU DAMOCLES, SWARP, SPICES, also Space Agency project like GlobIce, CCI Sea Ice, etc.... Ifremer integrates new sensors to the sea ice parameters datasets and prepare future missions (for example CFOSAT, CSCAT). Ifremer researchers have the experience of the syngery of the data (radiometer, scatterometer, SAR), and proposes here an original work combining Sentinel-1 data with buoys in the MIZ.Through the projects, Ifremer has a wide user communities, including the modeling community. 

Role in the project

Ifremer will provide the long term satellite sea ice datasets of concentration and displacement archived at the CERSAT, and will participate to the data integration in the system (WP2). In addition Ifremer will provide snapshots of the Sentinel-1A SAR data for the Arctic MIZ areas and supersites of the project combining with buoys, new algorithms will be developed to detect high resolution phenomena like ocean eddies using high resolution SAR, visible and altimeter sensors (WP6).