EMSO is an array of seafloor and water-column observatories distributed across Europe seas. EMSO provides crucial data for the understanding of fundamental processes in the marine domain that is significant for a number of short, medium and long-term events such as global change or catastrophic episodes with slow patterns that are difficult to discern with short sampling due to long-term processes variability. The high resolution, long-time-series collection of multiple variables across a breadth of environments represents the only approach capable of shedding light on the complexity of these systems and is required to document and predict episodic events, such as earthquakes, submarine slides, tsunamis, benthic storms, biodiversity changes, pollution, and gas hydrate (methane) release. Climate change, ocean ecosystem disturbance, and marine hazards represent urgent scientific and societal challenges and EMSO is designed to provide relevant data at an unprecedented level of accuracy, consistency, comparability, and continuity at the regional scale. In real-time it also generates long-term measurements of ocean parameters.

The interactive monitoring capacity of EMSO allows tracking these critical changes and delivering knowledge and tools to enable Europe to evaluate strategies to prepare and adapt to these changes. EMSO allows the pooling of resources and expertise, and coordination to assemble harmonised data into a comprehensive regional ocean image, which will then be made available to researchers and stakeholders worldwide via an open and interoperable data access system.