Course guide

Course aims, objectives and goals

Participants completing this course will:

• be able to access, download and work with single-sensor and multi-sensor ocean colour data sets
• understand the advantages, consequences and limitations associated with differing approaches to atmospheric correction
• appreciate the complexity of selecting bio-optical algorithms for ocean colour retrievals
• be familiar with the key considerations needed for multi-sensor synergy and harmonisation
• know how to assess and apply product flags, determine product quality, and construct match-up validation workflows
• gain experience of operational satellite data production

In order to achieve these objectives we have developed a training course that focuses on a mix of taught and interactive elements. The aim is to not only introduce you various ocean colour records that we have at our disposal, but to give you the tools ask questions about product suitability and quality, enabling you to make decisions about data selection and synergy in the future.

As part of the course, we will introduce a series of group "mini-projects", each associated with a region of interest. You will have a chance to develop these during the week. On the final day you will have the opportunity to present your progress. You may choose the form of your final presentation (e.g. powerpoint, Jupyter Notebook, etc.), but it must be something "tangible" that we can archive for the future. The mini-projects, and their respective groups, will be introduced on day 1 of the course.

Course schedule

The course will be hosted across 5-days, from Dec 7th (Sunday) to Dec 11th (Thursday) in Darmstadt, following the 2025 IOCS meeting. You can find the preliminary course schedule below;

Please note the following important logistical points;

1. The course will be hosted at EUMETSAT Headquarters. Please note that this is not the same venue as the IOCS meeting, which is hosted at the Darmstadtium.
2. On the first day, we will meet at EUMETSAT at 08:30 am. This will give us time to complete the necessary procedures to ensure site access for the rest of the week. Important: Please bring identification (e.g. your passport) with you.
3. We are coordinating evening activities on the Sunday (Christmas Market visit), Monday ("Ask me anything") and Tuesday (Control room "tour"). The schedule is dense and these activities are entirely optional! More information will follow.

Preparatory sessions

There will be a mandatory online technical check-in session, to ensure that you have access to the relevant portals and have installed our tools correctly. There are four possible times for this meeting, scheduled for November 27th and 28th at 10:00 and 15:00 CET. (Note: if you cannot make any of these sessions, please contact Ben directly via Moodle)

You can find the sign-up sheet for the technical check-in sessions here. You only need to attend one session and if all went well with your preparation, you will only need to be present for 10 minutes. To sign-up, please use the dropdown menus on the "Technical check session" sheet of the linked spreadsheet. To speed up the process, we have provided a second sheet on this document called "Installation record". On this sheet, you can record your progress with installing the required tools. The accompanying installation guide describes the steps you need to take in more detail. Please work your way through this and record your progress before the online technical check-in session.

Course requirements, software and tools

What do you need to bring

You will need to bring the following to the course:

• Your laptop; loaded with all the software packages and data specified and checked in the preparation session
• Your passport or national id (only on day 1)
• A willingness to contribute. There will likely be aspects of the course where some of you are more of an expert than we are! We encourage you to share this knowledge, helping us to grow the course alongside best practice in the science.

Code base

All of the code used in this course is hosted in an external GitLab instance. We will also supply some example data that will support some of our course activities. You can access to both code and data via the links below:

• MSOC GitLab repository (this will be updated on day 1 of the course)
• Supporting data package (link to follow on day 1 of the course)

Q&A and knowledge boards

Alongside the discussion forum, we will run a Padlet Q&A board throughout the course. You can use this board to drop in a quick question about anything you encounter throughout the course. We will deal with any questions that come up during the end-of-day Q&A sessions. (Please try and drop your questions in the relevant day/column!)

• Q&A board (to open at course start)

Some sessions will also contain knowledge gathering activities. To gather the outputs form these, we will use a Padlet Knowledge Board.

• Knowledge board (to open at course start)

Course longevity

We intend to keep this course "live" after the event closes. We also intend to re-use the content in later courses, packaging it in such a way that it can be picked up and used by others, either for learning or teaching. To support this we intend to:

• record some of the presentation sessions (presenter only!)
• make these recordings available
• transcribe the audio for subtitling and translation
• provide AI-driven summaries of sessions

We do not intend to record the "classroom" as a whole during presentations or to record any interactive sessions, though we may summarise your feedback if interesting questions are raised. We hope you agree to this approach. Please feel free to approach us, if you do not.