For many years now, VLIZ has been an active player and a household name in the global marine research community. This is shown by the numerous products and services for which the international research community frequently relies on our institute. We will present two of them to you.
VLIZ and the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of UNESCO (UNESCO/IOC) jointly provide technical support to the global Sea Level Station Monitoring Facility. This service makes it possible to monitor the operational status of tide gauges worldwide. Over 1000 tide gauges are distributed across the worldwide ocean, near islands and along continental coasts, usually in ports. They send their data via satellites to a data centre; then VLIZ converts the different data formats and displays them uniformly on the website of the Sea Level Station Monitoring Facility. De website is open to all users and offers real-time data. This makes it possible to develop a wide range of derived products. This was very useful when a tsunami alert was issued in Chile, Peru, Ecuador and Colombia in early 2022 as a result of the eruption of the submarine volcano Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai in the Pacific Ocean. The 15-metre high tsunami struck the nearby Tonga archipelago, but the tide gauges of het Sea Level Station Monitoring Facility made it possible to monitor how the tsunami travelled across the Pacific Ocean and perform a quick inspection of the tsunami alert situation.
Since 2006, the VLIZ project ‘Marine Regions’ has made the maritime boundaries, names and locations of underwater objects worldwide available as open data. In 2022, the VLIZ Marine Regions team developed a brand-new, open and worldwide data set of so-called extended continental shelves. These are parts of the sea where a country can claim exclusive rights to the natural resources on and below the seabed. Examples include marine organisms living on the seabed as well as oil, natural gas and manganese nodules.
Marine Regions is managed by VLIZ as part of the LifeWatch Species Information Backbone. Within this context, it is supported by the Flemish contribution to LifeWatch. Globally, users can download the data via www.marineregions.org/downloads.php, or visualise and analyse them via several web services. In 2022, Marine Regions registered 25,896 downloads from 184 countries. The data set is primarily aimed at scientific research and education, and is not intended for legal, economic (i.e. exploration of natural resources) or navigation purposes.