Begun in 2019, it had progressed through Study Team into Ad Hoc Team before maturing into CEOS’s first cross-cutting VC in April 2024. COAST (Coastal Observations, Applications, Services and Tools) was always guided by the clear vision of developing new novel multi-platform products and information focused on the underserved coastal ocean.
COAST was also among the initial UN Ocean Decade’s endorsed contributions in June 2021. Co-Design alongside identified regional user/stakeholders is central to COAST’s approach to information sharing and so empowering stakeholder use through tutorials has long been COAST’s outreach goal. Both were combined into COAST’s milestone 2025 CEOS WorkPlan activity to present a tutorial at the UN Ocean Decade Conference, or related event.
Here is the rundown of outreach achieved at a trio of events in June 2025: During the One Ocean Science Congress on June 5th – COAST Co-Lead Aurelien Carboniere (CNES) presented the oral session: Cutting-Edge Coastal Satellite Information for Decision-making from CEOS COAST in the invited special Session T10-18 – From Science to Shoreline (see photos below). This meeting was technical in nature and oriented toward science professionals. In the EU Pavilion “La Baleine” (also known as ‘the Whale’) on June 4th, Dr. Jerome Benveniste (Benveniste Space and COSPAR, formerly of ESA) presented an hour-long public-oriented presentation introducing COAST products and emphasizing ESA and COSPAR developed coastal products, which is now available to replay online. Many successful connections to users were made for COAST at the OOSC, but unfortunately a tutorial platform could not be realised during the 3rd UN Ocean Conference.
Aurelien Carbonniere (CNES, the person on the left) is presenting the COAST talk during the One Ocean Science Congress on June 5th.
We were excited that many presentations and posters describing COAST products, tools and services had been accepted to ESA’s Living Planet Symposium 2025, in late June. A special session B.02.09 co-chaired by CSIRO’s Dr. Alex Held entitled “The Role of Spaceborne Imaging Spectroscopy and Drone-based Calibration Data for Integrated Freshwater and Coastal Monitoring” took place on June 26th and featured outstanding coastal presentations. University of Maryland’s Dr. SeungHyun Son’s poster: Satellite Observations of Long-term Water Quality Properties using Improved Algorithms in the Chesapeake Bay in session A.08.10 – Coastal Ocean and Land-sea interaction, was presented on Wednesday, June 25, 2025. This poster shared information products developed for COAST and available in the Application Knowledge Hub.
The image shows the assembled audience attending the ESALPS25 CEOS COAST Demonstration Tutorial on June 22, 2025 in Vienna, Austria.
The event which most highlighted COAST VC was our Demonstration! Tutorial opportunities at ESALPS were opened in early 2025 and COAST was among those selected to offer an 80 minute demonstration on June 22nd, 2025. This was the day before ESALPS25 officially began. A diverse team of COAST product presenters each gave 10 minutes worth of insight into their array of mature and experimental products and took audience questions. ISRO, Geoscience Australia, CSIRO, CNES, University of Maryland (for NOAA), and ESA products were featured, emphasising COAST’s Land-To-Sea and Sea-To-Land development pilots. Continental- and Regional-scale products were shared for Australia, Africa, Europe, Bay of Bengal and Chesapeake Bay. We targeted 40 attendees and provided diverse COAST product content and a comprehensive takeaway (with QR codes) to enable participants full attention during the demo, yet an ability to revisit and test the public Application Knowledge Hub portal and available COAST products following the events. Feedback channels remained open through mid July and we also polled the audience about their interests in coastal products and their motivation for attending our tutorial (noting there were 6 concurrent tutorial sessions).
CEOS COAST-VC Co-Leads,
