Systems and tools for locating bloom of jellyfish and predicting their displacement towards the coast

In the last decade the presence of jellyfish in the Mediterranean Sea is rising impacts on the marine environment and on human activities. The main consequences are related with human health (each summer about 150.000 person need medical assistance for jellyfish stings in the Mediterranean area), fishing and aquaculture (jellyfish block fishing nets impairing their functioning, and eat fish eggs and larvae, and their food), industry (blocking cooling inlets of industrial complexes and power plants). In order to mitigate this phenomenon a key strategy comprises the setting up of early warning and forecasting systems based on large scale observations and numerical model fields such as those available from the Copernicus products (EO and other data from the Marine Environment Monitoring Service). Copernicus satellite data products, in particular Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-5, can assist jellyfish presence prediction by providing information on a range of physical and biological ocean parameters that concur to jellyfish blooms, especially in terms of aggregation due to oceanographic conditions. Ocean temperature, salinity, water currents, sea-surface height, upwelling-events and primary production that strongly affect jellyfish biomass. Several citizen-science based projects have been proposed in the Mediterranean Sea to collect data on jellyfish (Italian project "Occhio alia Medusa", Maltese project "Spot the Jellyfish").

This workshop is organized to discuss the latest improvements in the detection, spreading and forecasting of jellyfish blooms, in order to compare different experiences on the use of Copernicus data, and to gather user requirements from the scientific community.