Annual cycles of horizontal distributions of temperature and salinity, and of concentrations of nutrients, suspended particulate matter and chlorophyll on the northwest european shelf

Abstract

During the years 1993 to 1996 the MAST project “Northwest European Shelf Programme (NOWESP)p ]During the years 1993 to 1996 the MAST project “Northwest European Shelf Programme (NOWESP)” has compiled most available observations for nine key state variables, namely temperature, salinity, phosphate, nitrate, nitrite, ammonia, silicate, suspended particulate matter (SPM) and chlorophyll, for the Northwest European Shelf. One important aim of NOWESP was to derive mean spatial distributions for each month by merging the available data to construct climatological monthly mean distributions to picture the climatological annual cycle, disregarding possible trends, e.g. in the coastal areas. In these areas the horizontal distributions have a bias towards the last fifteen years of observation because of the trends and of the increasing number of observations, and the monthly mean data are representative of the decade 1984 to 1993.