Abstract
Abstract. This study presents in detail a new climate index for the Newfoundland and Labrador (NL) shelf. The NL climate index (NLCI) aims to describe the environmental conditions on the NL shelf and in the Northwest Atlantic as a whole. It consists of the average of 10 normalized anomalies, or subindices, derived annually: winter North Atlantic Oscillation, air temperature, sea ice season severity, iceberg count, seasonal sea surface temperature, vertically averaged temperature and salinity at the Atlantic Zone Monitoring Program (AZMP) Station 27, summer cold intermediate layer (CIL) core temperature at AZMP Station 27, summer CIL area on three AZMP hydrographic sections, and bottom temperature on the NL shelf. This index runs from 1951 to 2020 and will be updated annually. It provides continuity in the production of advice for fisheries management and ecosystem status on the NL shelf, for which a similar but recently abandoned index was used. The new climate index and its subindices are available at https://doi.org/10.20383/101.0301 (Cyr and Galbraith, 2020).
Highlights
Climate indices are often regarded as simple ways to relate the mean environmental conditions to the state of an ecosystem
This study presents in detail a new climate index for the Newfoundland and Labrador (NL) shelf
While the data for Nuuk are obtained from the Danish Meteorological Institute (Vinther et al, 2006), the air temperature data from the Canadian sites are from the second generation of Adjusted and Homogenized Canadian Climate Data (AHCCD) that accounts for shifts in station location and changes in observation methods (Vincent et al, 2012)
Summary
Climate indices are often regarded as simple ways to relate the mean environmental conditions to the state of an ecosystem. Following the approach of Petrie et al (2006a, b), a composite climate index was developed for the NL shelf by Colbourne et al (2008) This composite climate index was derived by summing 26 individual normalized anomalies (e.g. winter North Atlantic Oscillation, air temperature at several sites, surface and bottom temperature at several sites, average temperature, salinity and area of water colder than 0 ◦C along oceanographic transects, etc.; see Table 1). These individual components did not, begin with the same year.
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