SEPRISE (Sustained, Efficient Production of Required information Services) has been a Specific Support Action funded by the EC within the 6th Framework Programme to further operational oceanographic services, in line with the priorities of the members of EuroGOOS. These priorities also coincide with those of the European Commission and of the GMES/GEO initiatives. The project was finalized in May 2007.
One of the deliverables from the project was to provide an operational demonstration with the main objectives to demonstrate the feasibility of joint pan-European data exchange, regular analysis and forecasting in an operational mode and by this demonstrate the European capacity in operational oceanography.
The demonstration has proven the possibility of sustained coordinated production and acts as a model for continued efforts.
Currently 45 European oceanographic and meteorological institutes provide data to SEPRISE. Data is available in real-time from fixed stations and buoys. In addition, model results have been obtained to provide forecasts for the same locations. Data is collected in any possible format and converted into one single format. SEPRISE currently includes 385 stations producing 652 time series once every hour.
Despite the fact that the funding from EU has ceased the SEPRISE demonstration is still active much thanks to the contributors' willingness to keep it going and the support from ongoing EU projects such as ECOOP. New stations and models are continuously added to the system.
Coriolis has collaborated with SEPRISE to create a complementary system including Argo floats, displaying information in Google Earth as well as providing an ftp site with freely available data - see the Coriolis-SEPRISE page.