Abstract
Temperature is observed to have different trends at coastal and ocean locations along the western Iberian Peninsula from 1975 to 2006, which corresponds to the last warming period in the area under study. The analysis was carried out by means of the Simple Ocean Data Assimilation (SODA). Reanalysis data are available at monthly scale with a horizontal resolution of 0.5°×0.5° and a vertical resolution of 40 levels, which allows obtaining information beneath the sea surface. Only the first 21 vertical levels (from 5.0 m to 729.35 m) were considered here, since the most important changes in heat content observed for the world ocean during the last decades, correspond to the upper 700 m. Warming was observed to be considerably higher at ocean locations than at coastal ones. Ocean warming ranged from values on the order of 0.3°C dec−1 near surface to less than 0.1°C dec−1 at 500 m, while coastal warming showed values close to 0.2°C dec−1 near surface, decreasing rapidly below 0.1°C dec−1 for depths on the order of 50 m. The heat content anomaly for the upper 700 m, showed a sharp increase from coast (0.46 Wm−2) to ocean (1.59 Wm−2). The difference between coastal and ocean values was related to the presence of coastal upwelling, which partially inhibits the warming from surface of near shore water.
Highlights
Numerous studies on global climate change have come to the conclusion that the last three decades of the twentieth century were the most intense warming period ever observed
The aim of this study is to describe the differences in the variability of temperature and heat content between coastal and ocean locations along the western Iberian Peninsula from 1975 to 2006
The area located in front of the Western Iberian Peninsula has been considered
Summary
Numerous studies on global climate change have come to the conclusion that the last three decades of the twentieth century were the most intense warming period ever observed. Several warmingcooling cycles have been detected over the 20th century both at global and regional scales [6,7,8,9,10] These changes were not evenly distributed around the world s oceans, with some regions warming faster or slower than the global average [11,12]. The Atlantic Ocean is responsible for one third of the increase in heat content observed from 1955 to 1998 [13,14,15] These differences are even more marked at regional scales where some areas warm at higher or lower rates than others due to changes in winds, ocean currents, thermohaline depth and upwelling [16,17,18,19,20,21]. Some regions have shown the existence of different surface warming rates at coastal and ocean locations [22,23]
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