General Introduction: PREVIMER, a French pre-operational coastal ocean forecasting capability.

Pre-operational system PREVIMER provides with coastal observations and forecasts along French coasts: currents, waves, sea levels, temperature, salinity, primary production and turbidity. These marine environmental data come from in situ observations, satellite images, and numerical models. They are centralized and archived in PREVIMER databases, then published on website (real time and historical data), and freely available to users, private companies as well as public administrations. This paper describes in details PREVIMER components and users.