Coastal Aquaculture Screening
A deep dive into how a plain-language request is turned into an actionable data package for a mid-size aquaculture firm.
Client
Mid-size aquaculture firm assessing 3 candidate near-shore sites for gilthead seabream and European seabass cages.
The Question
“Are these locations exposed to frequent marine heatwaves or poor water quality? Give us a 2010–2024 view, with clean files we can open in Excel/QGIS.”
Scope
- Area: ~9,600 km² (coastal polygon)
- Time range: 2010–2024
- Variables (3): Sea Surface Temperature (daily L4), Chlorophyll-a (OLCI coastal), Surface currents (1/12°)
- Urgency: Standard (~7 days)
What We Did
- Identified CMEMS products matched to plain-English request (SST L4 global daily; Ocean Colour OLCI coastal; Global currents 1/12°).
- Subset by ROI/dates, reprojected to WGS84, masked land, harmonized grids for analysis.
- Computed monthly climatology, anomalies, and marine heatwave metrics.
- Extracted site-level time series + ROI summaries.
- QA + short interpretive brief (thresholds, caveats, provenance).
Deliverables
- Data: CSV, GeoTIFF, NetCDF.
- Maps: 6 high-res PNGs.
- Docs: PDF brief, data dictionary, QGIS project.
Turnaround
5 business days (standard).
Outcome
- Two sites showed >25 marine-heatwave days/year and elevated summer chlorophyll — flagged as higher-risk.
- Client advanced the most stable corridor.
- Value: They avoided commissioning a month of internal scripting and manual downloading.