Physical forcing and physical/biochemical variability of the Mediterranean Sea: a review of unresolved issues and directions for future research

This paper is the outcome of a workshop held in Rome in November 2011 on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the POEM (Physical Oceanography of the Eastern Mediterranean) program. In the workshop discussions, a number of unresolved issues were identified for the physical and biogeochemical properties of the Mediterranean Sea as a whole, i.e., comprising the Western and Eastern sub-basins. Over the successive two years, the related ideas were discussed among the group of scientists who participated in the workshop and who have contributed to the writing of this paper. Three major topics were identified, each of them being the object of a section divided into a number of different sub-sections, each addressing a specific physical, chemical or biological issue: 1. Assessment of basin-wide physical/biochemical properties, of their variability and interactions. 2. Relative importance of external forcing functions (wind stress, heat/moisture fluxes, forcing through straits) vs. internal variability. 3. Shelf/deep sea interactions and exchanges of physical/biogeochemical properties and how they affect the sub-basin circulation and property distribution. Furthermore, a number of unresolved scientific/methodological issues were also identified and are reported in each sub-section after a short discussion of the present knowledge. They represent the collegial consensus of the scientists contributing to the paper. Naturally, the unresolved issues presented here constitute the choice of the authors and therefore they may not be exhaustive and/or complete. The overall goal is to stimulate a broader interdisciplinary discussion among the scientists of the Mediterranean oceanographic community, leading to enhanced collaborative efforts and exciting future discoveries

Advances in instrumented lagrangian buoys

Peer Reviewe

Remote sensing of ocean surface currents: a review of what is being observed and what is being assimilated

Ocean currents play a key role in Earth's climate – they impact almost any process taking place in the ocean and are of major importance for navigation and human activities at sea. Nevertheless, their observation and forecasting are still difficult. First, no observing system is able to provide direct measurements of global ocean currents on synoptic scales. Consequently, it has been necessary to use sea surface height and sea surface temperature measurements and refer to dynamical frameworks to derive the velocity field. Second, the assimilation of the velocity field into numerical models of ocean circulation is difficult mainly due to lack of data. Recent experiments that assimilate coastal-based radar data have shown that ocean currents will contribute to increasing the forecast skill of surface currents, but require application in multidata assimilation approaches to better identify the thermohaline structure of the ocean. In this paper we review the current knowledge in these fields and provide a global and systematic view of the technologies to retrieve ocean velocities in the upper ocean and the available approaches to assimilate this information into ocean models

The MEDGIB experiment, a valuable data set to test the MYOCEAN system in the Strait of Gibraltar and Alboran Sea

47th International Liege Colloquium on Marine Environmental Monitoring, Modelling and Prediction, 4-8 May 2015, Liège, BelgiumThe Gibraltar Strait is a hot spot area of maritime traffic being the natural door for the shortest route between Asia and Europe. 1/6 of the global marine trade is passing by the Gibraltar Strait every year. From an oceanographic point of view, the Gibraltar Strait is a challenging place for any operational system because it is the natural connection between the Mediterranean basin circulation and the Atlantic Ocean. On September 2014 an intensive drifter deployment was carried out in the Gibraltar Strait to validate the European MYOCEAN operational system on the frame of MEDESS-4MS project. The experiment consisted on deploying 35 satellite tracked drifters, mostly of CODE type equipped with temperature sensor and at sampling rate of 30 minutes, distributed along the strait and on both sides of the Gibraltar strait. Particular attention was put to perform a spatially quasi-synoptic deployment by coordinating four boats covering an area of about 340 nmˆ2 in 6 h. Up to our knowledge, the obtained set of trajectories gives for the first time a comprehensive lagrangian view of the inflow of the Atlantic waters and their recirculation over the Alboran Sea constituting a valuable data set to validate the operational systems in such challenging area. We show results intercomparing the drifters trajectories against the MY-OCEAN IBI system, the VHF surface radar fields and the regional high resolution SAMPA system. Additionally we test how surface quasigeostrophic theory (SQG) can be a very useful diagnostic tool to obtain operational velocity fields from direct processing of SST imagesPeer Reviewe

Towards an operational system for oil spill forecast in Spanish waters: initial development and implementation test

Publicado

Modelling the Renewable Transition: scenarios and pathways for a decarbonized future using pymedeas, a new open-source energy systems model

This paper reviews different approaches to modelling the energy transition towards a zero carbon economy. It identifies a number of limitations in current approaches such as a lack of consideration of out-of-equilibrium situations (like an energy transition) and non-linear feedbacks. To tackle those issues, the new open source integrated assessment model pymedeas is introduced, which allows the exploration of the design and planning of appropriate strategies and policies for decarbonizing the energy sector at World and EU level. The main novelty of the new open-source model is that it addresses the energy transition by considering biophysical limits, availability of raw materials, and climate change impacts. This paper showcases the model capabilities through several simulation experiments to explore alternative pathways for the renewable transition. In the selected scenarios of this work, future shortage of fossil fuels is found to be the most influential factor of the simulations system evolution. Changes in efficiency and climate change damages are also important determinants influencing model outcomes