Mercator Ocean is a French public company entirely devoted to operational oceanography. It was founded in April 2002 to lead the Mercator project and strengthen the development of an operational high resolution global ocean monitoring and forecasting capacity. Mercator Ocean performs as a consortium company (GIP), supported by the six major French institutes involved in oceanography, namely CNES (Space Agency), CNRS (National Research Center), Ifremer (French public institute for marine research), IRD (Research Institute for Development), Météo France and SHOM (Hydrographic and Oceanographic Service of the Navy).

Mercator Ocean is specifically tasked to provide routinely and in near-real-time a three dimensional depiction of the global ocean (temperature, salinity, currents …) to serve a wide range of intermediate users namely the GIP members, the French and international research community and the European GMES program actors. Possible applications are numerous and deal with climate changes at global scales and short term forecast of surface layers at any place of the ocean.

The Mercator system provides to Previmer simulated data of ocean circulation (temperature, salinity and currents) which are used by the project to force their models at the open sea boundaries and then take account on large scale circulation of the ocean. This service is ensured every week over a forecast period of 10 days.