An external view of the Met Office building at night.

Dr Marina Tonani

Marina is manager of the Shelf Seas Forecasting team and leader of the Copernicus Monitoring and Forecasting Centre for the North West-European Shelf

Areas of Expertise

  • Operational oceanography
  • Regional seas modelling
  • Validation of ocean forecast products

Publications by Marina Tonani

Current activities


Marina manages the Shelf Seas Forecasting Team which is part of the Ocean Forecasting Research and Development (OFRD) group.

The team is responsible for research, development, and maintenance of the shelf seas short range forecast models, and for assessing and monitoring the quality of the forecast products against in-situ and satellite observations and other forecasting models.

As the leader of the North West-European Shelf element of the Copernicus Marine Service she is responsible for the routine provision of ocean, wave and biogeochemical operational forecasts for ensuring the product quality and plan and implement the evolution of the forecasting model suites.

Career background

Marina has led the North West-European element of the EU Copernicus Marine Service since July 2015, when she joined the Met Office.

She led the Mediterranean Sea Forecasting Centre in the Copernicus precursor projects MyOcean-MyOcean2-MyOceanFO (2009-2015) while working at the Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia (Italy) where since 2003 she was in charge of the development, assessment and operational implementation of the Mediterranean Sea Forecasting system.

Marina completed a PhD in Geophysics in 2003 with a thesis on the predictability limits of the Mediterranean Sea at the Alma Mater Studiorum University of Bologna. During her thesis she developed a higher resolution ocean model (NEMO) for the Mediterranean Sea forecasting system. She previously obtained a MSc in Marine Environmental Sciences at Alma Mater University of Bologna (1998) and she had a student fellowship for studying physical oceanography at the University of Kiel (Germany) in 1995-1996.

External recognition

  • Leader of the North West-European Shelf element for the Copernicus Marine System (from 2015).
  • Joint WMO-IOC Technical Commission for Oceanography and Marine Meteorology (JCOMM) Expert Team on Operational Ocean Forecasting Systems (ETOOFS) core member (2012-2017).
  • GodaeOceanView Science team member (2010-2015).
  • MonGOOS (Mediterranean Oceanography Network for the Global Ocean Observing System) Modelling Working Group chair (2012-2015).
  • Co-chair of the Mercator Ocean International Expert Team on Ocean Forecasting (from 2019).