The proliferation of large sargassum rafts and their accumulation along the coastlines of the
Caribbean region and the West African coast has arisen in 2011 and set a new state of equilibrium in the tropical Atlantic ocean
The factors responsible for the increase in the amounts of sargassum in past years remain poorly understood, and despite recent progress, our capabilities to observe and predict their characteristics and movements remains limited.
This project is part of a constantly evolving scientific environment, with efforts being made in recent years to predict beaching in the short term (days to weeks) and that lead to the establishment of the sargassum institutional mission at Météo France.
SAMOUSSA ambition is to develop a systematic monitoring of sargassum proliferation and their life cycle at the scale of the Atlantic Basin.
To do so, the project is based on the synergy between kilometer-scale satellites acquire by the Meteosat Third Generation imager and the dedicated biogeochemical ocean model NEMO-Sarg.
Headline news
The SAMOUSSA team is delighted to announce the launch of the project at a meeting on March 28, 2025. This meeting will kick off the various activities. In particular, the remote sensing part will feed the model initialization. The main objective today is to obtain the first results by the end of the year, in […]