Current EOV Report

Merged satellite/in-situ surface current products and impact of AtlantOS observation

MedArgo: a drifting profiler program in the Mediterranean Sea

Special issue Mediterranean Ocean Forecasting System: toward environmental predictions - the results.-- 17 pages, 12 figures, 4 tablesIn the framework of the EU-funded MFSTEP project, autonomous drifting profilers were deployed throughout the Mediterranean Sea to collect temperature and salinity profile data and to measure subsurface currents. The realization of this profiler program in the Mediterranean, referred to as MedArgo, is described and assessed using data collected between June 2004 and December 2006 (including more than 2000 profiles). Recommendations are provided for the permanent future implementation of MedArgo in support of operational oceanography in the Mediterranean Sea.More than twenty drifting profilers were deployed from research vessels and ships-of-opportunity in most areas of the Mediterranean. They were all programmed to execute 5-day cycles with a drift at a parking depth of 350 m and CTD profiles from either 700 or 2000 m up to the surface. They stayed at the sea surface for about 6 h to be localised by, and transmit the data to, the Argos satellite system. The temperature and salinity data obtained with pumped Sea-Bird CTD instruments were processed and made available to the scientific community and to operational users in near-real time using standard Argo protocols, and were assimilated into Mediterranean numerical forecasting models.In general, the cycling and sampling characteristics chosen for the MedArgo profilers were found to be adequate for the Mediterranean. However, it is strongly advised to use GPS and global cellular phone telemetry or the future Argos bi-directional satellite system in order to avoid data compression and losses, for the continuation of the Mediterranean drifting profiler program.MedArgo was supported by the European Commission (V Framework Program – Energy, Environment and Sustainable Development) as part of the MFSTEP project (contract number EVK3-CT-2002-00075). We wish to thank all the scientists, captains and crew members for their skilled and enthusiastic assistance with the profiler deployments.Peer reviewe

An interlinked coastal observatory network for Europe

Existing coastal observatories in European waters are complex systems consisting of different observational components, providing crucial operational data for assessment, model validation and assimilation purposes. However, the geographical, structural, functional and operational heterogeneities that characterise them pose an enormous challenge to their efficient exploitation as information providers on a broader, cross-border, regional scale. To address this problem, the European Union (EU) Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) Towards a Joint European Research Infrastructure Network for Coastal Observatories (JERICO) project is creating a shared, pan-European framework for the networking of such observatories, promoting the identification and dissemination of best practices for their design, implementation and maintenance, as well as common data distribution and transnational access protocols to enhance their performance and sustainability. In doing so, the project is also laying down the foundation for the coastal element of the nascent European Ocean Observing System

Moose: An integrated multi-site system of NW Mediterranean marine and atmospheric observatories

Despite intensive research efforts undertaken in the Mediterranean Sea over more than a century, an integrated view of its evolution, viewed in the climate change and anthropogenic pressure, still lacks. In this context, a Mediterranean Ocean Observing System on Environment (MOOSE) has been set up as an interactive, distributed and integrated observatory system of the NW Mediterranean Sea to detect and identify long-term environmental anomalies. It will be based on a multisite system of continental shelf and deep-sea fixed stations as well as Lagrangian platform network to observe the spatio-temporal variability of processes interacting between the coastal-open ocean and the ocean-atmosphere components. Another target is to build efficient indicators of the health of the NW Mediterranean basin. MOOSE will also provide a large flux of realtime data to facilitate validation of operational oceanographic models. It will supply and maintain long-term time series, the only data sets that allow to evidence climatic trends. Finally, MOOSE project is supported by the Inter-Organization Environment Committee (CIO-E) and INSU to stimulate the national scientific community and European partners for a significant multidisciplinary program