The activity of routinely making, disseminating, and interpreting measurements of the seas and oceans so as to provide continuous forecasts of the future condition of the sea for as far ahead as possible, provide the most usefully accurate description of the present state of the sea including living resources, and assemble climatic long term datasets to provide data for the description of past states as well as time series showing trends and changes. This usually proceeds via the rapid transmission of observational data to computerised data assembly centers. There they are processed through numerical models to generate products for various applications.