Description: Capability for sea surface salinity observation was an important gap in ocean remote sensing in the last few decades of the 20th century. New technological developments during the 1990s at the European Space Agency led to the proposal of SMOS (Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity), an Earth explorer opportunity mission based on the use of a microwave interferometric radiometer, MIRAS (Microwave Imaging Radiometer with Aperture Synthesis). SMOS, the first satellite ever addressing the observation of ocean salinity from space, was successfully launched in November 2009. The determination of salinity from the MIRAS radiometric measurements at 1.4 GHz is a complex procedure that requires high performance from the instrument and accurate modelling of several physical processes that impact on the microwave emission of the ocean’s surface. This paper introduces SMOS in the ocean remote sensing context, and summarizes the MIRAS principles of operation and the SMOS salinity retrieval approach. It describes the Spanish SMOS high-level data processing centre (CP34) and the SMOS Barcelona Expert Centre on Radiometric Calibration and Ocean Salinity (SMOS-BEC), and presents a preliminary validation of global sea surface salinity maps operationally produced by CP34.

Description: The Copernicus Marine Environment Monitoring Service (CMEMS) Ocean State Report (OSR) provides an annual report of the state of the global ocean and European regional seas for policy and decision-makers with the additional aim of increasing general public awareness about the status of, and changes in, the marine environment. The CMEMS OSR draws on expert analysis and provides a 3-D view (through reanalysis systems), a view from above (through remote-sensing data) and a direct view of the interior (through in situ measurements) of the global ocean and the European regional seas. The report is based on the unique CMEMS monitoring capabilities of the blue (hydrography, currents), white (sea ice) and green (e.g. Chlorophyll) marine environment. This first issue of the CMEMS OSR provides guidance on Essential Variables, large-scale changes and specific events related to the physical ocean state over the period 1993–2015. Principal findings of this first CMEMS OSR show a significant increase in global and regional sea levels, thermosteric expansion, ocean heat content, sea surface temperature and Antarctic sea ice extent and conversely a decrease in Arctic sea ice extent during the 1993–2015 period. During the year 2015 exceptionally strong large-scale changes were monitored such as, for example, a strong El Niño Southern Oscillation, a high frequency of extreme storms and sea level events in specific regions in addition to areas of high sea level and harmful algae blooms. At the same time, some areas in the Arctic Ocean experienced exceptionally low sea ice extent and temperatures below average were observed in the North Atlantic Ocean.

Description: Published

Description: s235–s320

Description: 4A. Oceanografia e clima

Description: JCR Journal

Description: Si listano le singole sezioni in cui S.Simoncelli ha contribuito. Ogni sezione puo' essere citata separatamente dal report 1.1 Ocean temperature and salinity S. Mulet, B. Buongiorno Nardelli, S. Good, A. Pisano, E. Greiner, M. Monier E. Autret, L. Axell, F. Boberg, S. Ciliberti, M. Drévillon, R. Droghei, O. Embury, J. Gourrion, J. Høyer, M. Juza, J. Kennedy, B. Lemieux-Dudon, E. Peneva, R. Reid, S. Simoncelli, A. Storto, J. Tinker, K. von Schuckmann, S. L. Wakelin. 2.1. Ocean heat content ..K. von Schuckmann, A. Storto, S. Simoncelli, R. P. Raj, A.Samuelsen, A. de Pascual Collar, M. Garcia Sotillo, T Szerkely, M. Mayer, K. A. Peterson, H. Zuo, G. Garric, M. Monier. 3.4 Water mass formation processes in the Mediterranean Sea over the past 30 years S. Simoncelli, Nadia Pinardi, C. Fratianni, C. Dubois, G. Notarstefano. 3.5 Ventilation of the Western Mediterranean Deep Water through the Strait of Gibraltar S. Sammartino, J. García Lafuente, C. Naranjo, S. Simoncelli. 4.4 Unusual salinity pattern in the South Adriatic Sea in 2016 Z. Kokkini, G. Notarstefano P-M Poulain, E. Mauri, R. Gerin, S. Simoncelli

Description: The oceans regulate our weather and climate from global to regional scales. They absorb over 90% of accumulated heat in the climate system (IPCC 2013 IPCC. 2013. Climate change 2013: The physical science basis. Contribution of working group I to the fifth assessment report of the intergovernmental panel on climate change [Stocker TF, Qin D, Plattner G-K, Tignor M, Allen SK, Boschung J, Nauels A, Xia Y, Bex V, Midgley PM, editors]. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1535. doi: 10.1017/CBO9781107415324. [Crossref], , [Google Scholar]) and over a quarter of the anthropogenic carbon dioxide (Le Quéré et al. 2016 Le Quéré C, Andrew RM, Canadell JG, Sitch S, Korsbakken JI, Peters GP, Manning AC, Boden TA, Tans PP, Houghton RA, et al. 2016. Global carbon budget 2016. Earth Syst Sci Data. 8( 2): 605– 649. doi: 10.5194/essd-8-605-2016 [Crossref], [Web of Science ®], , [Google Scholar]). They provide nearly half of the world’s oxygen. Most of our rain and drinking water is ultimately regulated by the sea. The oceans provide food and energy and are an important source of the planet's biodiversity and ecosystem services. They are vital conduits for trade and transportation and many economic activities depend on them (OECD 2016 OECD . 2016. The ocean economy in 2030. Paris : OECD Publishing. doi: 10.1787/9789264251724-en. [Crossref], , [Google Scholar]). Our oceans are, however, under threat due to climate change and other human induced activities and it is vital to develop much better, sustainable and science-based reporting and management approaches (UN 2017 UN . 2017. Report of the United Nations conference to support the implementation of sustainable development goal 14: Conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development (Advance unedited version). https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/documents/15662FINAL_15_June_2017_RepoRe_Goal_14.pdf . [Google Scholar]). Better management of our oceans requires long-term, continuous and state-of-the art monitoring of the oceans from physics to ecosystems and global to local scales. The Copernicus Marine Environment Monitoring Service (CMEMS) has been set up to address these challenges at European level. Mercator Ocean was tasked in 2014 by the European Union under a delegation agreement to implement the operational phase of the service from 2015 to 2021 (CMEMS 2014 CMEMS . 2014. Technical annex to the delegation agreement with Mercator Ocean for the implementation of the Copernicus Marine Environment Monitoring Service (CMEMS). www.copernicus.eu/sites/default/files/library/CMEM_TechnicalAnnex_PUBLIC.docx.pdf . [Google Scholar]). The CMEMS now provides regular and systematic reference information on the physical state, variability and dynamics of the ocean, ice and marine ecosystems for the global ocean and the European regional seas (Figure 0.1; CMEMS 2016 CMEMS . 2016. High level service evolution strategy, a document prepared by Mercator Ocean with the support of the CMEMS STAC. [Google Scholar]). This capacity encompasses the description of the current situation (analysis), the prediction of the situation 10 days ahead (forecast), and the provision of consistent retrospective data records for recent years (reprocessing and reanalysis). CMEMS provides a sustainable response to European user needs in four areas of benefits: (i) maritime safety, (ii) marine resources, (iii) coastal and marine environment and (iv) weather, seasonal forecast and climate.

Description: Copernicus Marine Environment Monitoring Service

Description: Published

Description: S1-S142

Description: 4A. Oceanografia e clima

Description: JCR Journal

Description: Author Posting. © American Meteorological Society, 2020. This article is posted here by permission of American Meteorological Society for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Journal of the Atmospheric and Oceanic Technology 37(5), (2020): 789-806, doi:10.1175/JTECH-D-18-0244.1.

Description: Realistic ocean state prediction and its validation rely on the availability of high quality in situ observations. To detect data errors, adequate quality check procedures must be designed. This paper presents procedures that take advantage of the ever-growing observation databases that provide climatological knowledge of the ocean variability in the neighborhood of an observation location. Local validity intervals are used to estimate binarily whether the observed values are considered as good or erroneous. Whereas a classical approach estimates validity bounds from first- and second-order moments of the climatological parameter distribution, that is, mean and variance, this work proposes to infer them directly from minimum and maximum observed values. Such an approach avoids any assumption of the parameter distribution such as unimodality, symmetry around the mean, peakedness, or homogeneous distribution tail height relative to distribution peak. To reach adequate statistical robustness, an extensive manual quality control of the reference dataset is critical. Once the data have been quality checked, the local minima and maxima reference fields are derived and the method is compared with the classical mean/variance-based approach. Performance is assessed in terms of statistics of good and bad detections. It is shown that the present size of the reference datasets allows the parameter estimates to reach a satisfactory robustness level to always make the method more efficient than the classical one. As expected, insufficient robustness persists in areas with an especially low number of samples and high variability.

Description: This study has been conducted using EU Copernicus Marine Service Information and was supported by the European Union within the EU Copernicus Marine Service In Situ phase-I and phase-II contracts led by Ifremer. The publication was also supported by SOERE CTDO2 in France. The Argo data were collected and made freely available by the International Argo Program and the national programs that contribute to it (see http://www.argo.ucsd.edu, http://argo.jcommops.org). The Argo Program is part of the Global Ocean Observing System (http://doi.org/10.17882/42182). The marine mammal data were collected and made freely available by the International MEOP Consortium and the national programs that contribute to it (see http://www.meop.net; https://doi.org/10.17882/45461). Aleix Gelabert and Dídac Costa were the skippers of the OPOO, sponsored by the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (UNESCO) and Pharmaton. The BWR is a periodic oceanic race organized by the Fundació Navegació Oceànica de Barcelona (FNOB). Reviewer D. Briand provided some useful comments on the final version of the draft paper before submission.

Description: 2020-11-04

Description: © The Author(s), 2020. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Wong, A. P. S., Wijffels, S. E., Riser, S. C., Pouliquen, S., Hosoda, S., Roemmich, D., Gilson, J., Johnson, G. C., Martini, K., Murphy, D. J., Scanderbeg, M., Bhaskar, T. V. S. U., Buck, J. J. H., Merceur, F., Carval, T., Maze, G., Cabanes, C., Andre, X., Poffa, N., Yashayaev, I., Barker, P. M., Guinehut, S., Belbeoch, M., Ignaszewski, M., Baringer, M. O., Schmid, C., Lyman, J. M., McTaggart, K. E., Purkey, S. G., Zilberman, N., Alkire, M. B., Swift, D., Owens, W. B., Jayne, S. R., Hersh, C., Robbins, P., West-Mack, D., Bahr, F., Yoshida, S., Sutton, P. J. H., Cancouet, R., Coatanoan, C., Dobbler, D., Juan, A. G., Gourrion, J., Kolodziejczyk, N., Bernard, V., Bourles, B., Claustre, H., D'Ortenzio, F., Le Reste, S., Le Traon, P., Rannou, J., Saout-Grit, C., Speich, S., Thierry, V., Verbrugge, N., Angel-Benavides, I. M., Klein, B., Notarstefano, G., Poulain, P., Velez-Belchi, P., Suga, T., Ando, K., Iwasaska, N., Kobayashi, T., Masuda, S., Oka, E., Sato, K., Nakamura, T., Sato, K., Takatsuki, Y., Yoshida, T., Cowley, R., Lovell, J. L., Oke, P. R., van Wijk, E. M., Carse, F., Donnelly, M., Gould, W. J., Gowers, K., King, B. A., Loch, S. G., Mowat, M., Turton, J., Rama Rao, E. P., Ravichandran, M., Freeland, H. J., Gaboury, I., Gilbert, D., Greenan, B. J. W., Ouellet, M., Ross, T., Tran, A., Dong, M., Liu, Z., Xu, J., Kang, K., Jo, H., Kim, S., & Park, H. Argo data 1999-2019: two million temperature-salinity profiles and subsurface velocity observations from a global array of profiling floats. Frontiers in Marine Science, 7, (2020): 700, doi:10.3389/fmars.2020.00700.

Description: In the past two decades, the Argo Program has collected, processed, and distributed over two million vertical profiles of temperature and salinity from the upper two kilometers of the global ocean. A similar number of subsurface velocity observations near 1,000 dbar have also been collected. This paper recounts the history of the global Argo Program, from its aspiration arising out of the World Ocean Circulation Experiment, to the development and implementation of its instrumentation and telecommunication systems, and the various technical problems encountered. We describe the Argo data system and its quality control procedures, and the gradual changes in the vertical resolution and spatial coverage of Argo data from 1999 to 2019. The accuracies of the float data have been assessed by comparison with high-quality shipboard measurements, and are concluded to be 0.002°C for temperature, 2.4 dbar for pressure, and 0.01 PSS-78 for salinity, after delayed-mode adjustments. Finally, the challenges faced by the vision of an expanding Argo Program beyond 2020 are discussed.

Description: AW, SR, and other scientists at the University of Washington (UW) were supported by the US Argo Program through the NOAA Grant NA15OAR4320063 to the Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and Ocean (JISAO) at the UW. SW and other scientists at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) were supported by the US Argo Program through the NOAA Grant NA19OAR4320074 (CINAR/WHOI Argo). The Scripps Institution of Oceanography's role in Argo was supported by the US Argo Program through the NOAA Grant NA15OAR4320071 (CIMEC). Euro-Argo scientists were supported by the Monitoring the Oceans and Climate Change with Argo (MOCCA) project, under the Grant Agreement EASME/EMFF/2015/1.2.1.1/SI2.709624 for the European Commission.