Abstract
The increasing science and society requests for ocean monitoring from global to regional and local scales, the need for integration and convergence into a globally consistent ocean observing system as well as the need for improvement of access to information are now internationally recognized goals to progress toward the sustainable management of a healthy ocean. To respond to these challenges at regional level, the Balearic Islands Coastal Observing and Forecasting System (SOCIB) is developing a comprehensive set of ocean indicators in the Mediterranean Sea and around the Balearic Islands, key environments that are strongly affected by climate change and human pressure. This new SOCIB value-added product addresses the sub-regional ocean variability from daily (events) to interannual/decadal (climate) scales. A user-friendly interface has been implemented to monitor, visualize and communicate ocean information that is relevant for a wide range of sectors, applications and regional end-users. These sub-regional indicators allowed us to detect specific events in real time. Remarkable events and features identified include marine heat waves, atmospheric storm, extreme river discharge, mesoscale eddy, deep convection among others, all of them being oceanic phenomena that directly impact the ocean circulation and marine ecosystems. The long-term variations, in response to climate change, are also addressed highlighting and quantifying trends in physical and biogeochemical components of the ocean as well as sub-regional differences. At both (sub-) regional, national and international levels, a society-aligned science will have stronger impact on policy decision-makings and will support society to implement specific actions to address worldwide environmental challenges.
Highlights
Covering 71% of Earth’s surface and by its capacity to store and redistribute large amounts of heat, freshwater and carbon around the world (IPCC, 2013; Abram et al, 2019), the ocean plays a central role in regulating weather and climate and contributes to the economic wealth and security of many nations, providing food, energy, transport, commerce, and recreation.Multivariate Subregional Mediterreanean Sea IndicatorsAround 28% of the world population lives in the near-coast zone, below an elevation of 100 m and closer than 100 km from the coast (Kummu et al, 2016; Abram et al, 2019)
This paper proposes multi-parameter and multi-scale approaches to establish the possible link between the different components of the ocean and to proper interpret and understand the ocean variations in this region
The recently updated indicators presented in this paper show positive trends in sea surface temperature (SST) over the 39-year period around 0.038+/−0.002◦C/year in the whole basin, with higher mean value of 0.044+/−0.002◦C/year in the eastern Mediterranean (EMED) than in the western part (WMED) with mean value of 0.032+/−0.002◦C/year
Summary
Covering 71% of Earth’s surface and by its capacity to store and redistribute large amounts of heat, freshwater and carbon around the world (IPCC, 2013; Abram et al, 2019), the ocean plays a central role in regulating weather and climate and contributes to the economic wealth and security of many nations, providing food, energy, transport, commerce, and recreation. The REP product, which is available only at monthly mean scale, is used to establish the daily, monthly and annual climatologies over the reference period 1998–2015 (as explained in Section “Sea Surface Temperature, Marine Heat Wave”) and compute the chlorophyll-a concentration anomaly (CHLA) To respond to both science and society needs, as for SST and SSTA, the diagnostics for CHL and CHLA deal with the daily, monthly and annual monitoring (Table 3). This interactive website gives access to the user-friendly visualization of (sub-) regionally integrated near real-time and historical ocean variables that are classified into two categories: surface and vertically integrated ocean indicators (as presented along Sections “Surface Ocean Variables” and “Integrated Ocean Variables”) It is automatically updated simultaneously with the figures that are produced and updated on a daily, monthly, seasonal and annual bases according to the temporal scale of the diagnostics. The monitoring is less intense, high variability appears with generally higher northward flow than southward flow
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