Description: The Mediterranean community represented in this paper is the result of more than 30 years of EU and nationally funded coordination, which has led to key contributions in science concepts and operational initiatives. Together with the establishment of operational services, the community has coordinated with universities, research centers, research infrastructures and private companies to implement advanced multi-platform and integrated observing and forecasting systems that facilitate the advancement of operational services, scientific achievements and mission-oriented innovation. Thus, the community can respond to societal challenges and stakeholders needs, developing a variety of fit-for-purpose services such as the Copernicus Marine Service. The combination of state-of-the-art observations and forecasting provides new opportunities for downstream services in response to the needs of the heavily populated Mediterranean coastal areas and to climate change. The challenge over the next decade is to sustain ocean observations within the research community, to monitor the variability at small scales, e.g., the mesoscale/submesoscale, to resolve the sub-basin/seasonal and inter-annual variability in the circulation, and thus establish the decadal variability, understand and correct the model-associated biases and to enhance model-data integration and ensemble forecasting for uncertainty estimation. Better knowledge and understanding of the level of Mediterranean variability will enable a subsequent evaluation of the impacts and mitigation of the effect of human activities and climate change on the biodiversity and the ecosystem, which will support environmental assessments and decisions. Further challenges include extending the science-based added-value products into societal relevant downstream services and engaging with communities to build initiatives that will contribute to the 2030 Agenda and more specifically to SDG14 and the UN's Decade of Ocean Science for sustainable development, by this contributing to bridge the science-policy gap. The Mediterranean observing and forecasting capacity was built on the basis of community best practices in monitoring and modeling, and can serve as a basis for the development of an integrated global ocean observing system.

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: The formation of intermediate and deep water masses is one of the most important processes occurring in the Mediterranean Sea, being a component of its general overturning circulation, and it has crucial implications on the ecosystem. The objective of the proposed work is to revise the main water mass formation events occurred during the latest 30 years (1987-2016) in the Mediterranean Sea and analyse their impact on biogeochemical properties considering the CMEMS Med-MFC physical and biogeochemical reanalysis data sets (https://doi.org/10.25423/medsea_reanalysis_phys_006_004 and https://doi.org/10.25423/MEDSEA_REANALYSIS_BIO_006_008 respectively). The analysis takes into consideration the four regions where events of intermediate and deep water formation are known to occur: 1) the Gulf of Lions for the Western Mediterranean Deep Waters; 2) the Southern Adriatic Pit for the Eastern Mediterranean Deep Waters; 3) the Cretan Sea for Cretan Intermediate Waters and Cretan Deep Waters; 4) the Rhodes Gyre, the area of formation of the so- called Levantine Intermediate Waters and Levantine Deep Waters. Annual water mass formation rates have been computed using daily mixed layer depth estimates considering the annual maximum volume of water above mixed layer depth with potential density within or higher than specific thresholds, and then divided by seconds per year. The use of different density thresholds reported in literature to identify water masses allows to detect variations of their characteristics over time, as observed from observations. The adopted methodology might underestimate the actual water mass formation rate but, thanks to the assimilation of in situ temperature and salinity profiles and the interactive heat flux correction based on observed satellite sea surface temperature, it permits an accurate estimation of the mixed layer depth and to detect the main open ocean convection events from the selected reanalysis data set. The analysis of chlorophyll and nutrient dynamics during the most significant episodes of water mass formation in North West Mediterranean and South Adriatic Sea highlights that these intense physical processes have an impact on the biogeochemical properties. We verified that dense water formation changes the structure of nutrients fields and might cause precondition for chlorophyll blooms, highlighting a strong link between vertical transport mechanisms and primary productivity. The CMEMS Mediterranean Sea physical reanalysis is able to reproduce both Eastern Mediterranean Transient and Western Mediterranean Transition phenomena and catches the principal water mass formation events reported in literature. This result is promising because it allows a constant monitoring of the open ocean deep convection process in the Mediterranean Sea, a better understanding of the multiple drivers of the general overturning circulation at interannual and multidecadal time scales and the possible effects on the Mediterranean ecosystems.

Description: Published

Description: Vienna

Description: 4A. Oceanografia e clima

Description: This work describes a set of numerical experiments carried out using a coupled wave-ocean modeling system implemented in the Mediterranean Sea in order to meet the needs of an improvement of the operational sea state and current analysis and forecasts in the framework of the MyOcean FollowOn project. MyOcean is a series of projects granted by the European Commission within the GMES Program (Seventh Framework Program), whose objective is a pan-European capacity for ocean monitoring and forecasting.

Description: ingv

Description: Published

Description: 1-54

Description: 3SR. AMBIENTE - Servizi e ricerca per la Società

Description: N/A or not JCR

Description: INGV

Description: Published

Description: 4A. Oceanografia e clima

Description: An EMODnet activity has started in 2013 to assess how well the European marine monitoring data meets the requirements of a sustainable blue economy. The activity is done by six European Sea Basin Checkpoints listed in the EMODnet central web page: http://www.emodnet.eu/checkpoints. Checkpoints should develop an assessment framework that considers “Use Cases” or “Challenges” to evaluate the fitness for use of input monitoring data sets. The Challenge products are related to both Blue Growth and the Marine Strategy Framework Directive objectives. The idea is that the quality of the Challenge products will inform stakeholders on how monitoring data set are “fit for use”. The Checkpoint assessment framework developed for the Mediterranean Sea is implemented through a “Service” composed of: 1) a GIS metadatabase with information about upstream data sources for Challenge products and availability indicators; 2) a Web GIS product display, encompassing links to the upstream data sources; 3) a tool to evaluate and display the statistics of assessment indicators. User requirements are recorded in the product catalogue (Data Product Specifications), which can be viewed for corrective actions. The same assessment framework is now being applied to the Atlantic and the Black Sea thus producing in the near future the first large basin scale assessment of input monitoring data set adequacy for applications.

Description: DG MARE

Description: Published

Description: 415-422

Description: 4A. Oceanografia e clima

Description: N/A or not JCR

Description: The Mediterranean Forecasting System (MFS) is a numerical ocean prediction system that produces analyses, reanalyses and short term forecasts for the entire Mediterranean Sea and its Atlantic Ocean adjacent areas. The system is now part of the Copernicus Marine Environment Monitoring Service (CMEMS) providing regular and systematic information about the physical state and dynamics of the Mediterranean Sea through the Med-MFC (Mediterranean Monitoring and Forecasting Center). MFS has been implemented in the Mediterranean Sea with 1/16o horizontal resolution and 72 vertical levels and is composed by the hydrodynamic model NEMO (Nucleus for European Modelling of the Ocean) 2-way online coupled with the third generation wave model WW3 (WaveWatchIII) and forced by ECMWF atmospheric fields at 1/8o horizontal resolution. The model solutions are corrected by the data assimilation system (3D variational-3Dvar scheme adapted to the oceanic assimilation problem, Dobricic and Pinardi, 2008) with a daily assimilation cycle of satellite Sea Level Anomaly (SLA) and vertical profiles of Temperature and Salinity. In this study we present a new estimate the of the background error covariance matrix with vertical Empirical Orthogonal Functions (EOFs) that are defined at each grid point of the model domain in order to better account for the error covariance between temperature and salinity in the shelf and open ocean areas. Moreover the Error covariance matrix is z-dependent and varies in each month. This new dataset has been tested and validated for more than 2 years against a background error correlation matrix varying only seasonally and in thirteen sub-regions of the Mediterranean Sea. Latest developments include the implementation of an upgraded 3Dvar (Storto et al. 2012) for a high-resolution model, 1/24o in the horizontal and 141 vertical levels

Description: Published

Description: Bergen, Norway

Description: 3SR. AMBIENTE - Servizi e ricerca per la Società

Description: The Mediterranean Forecasting System (MFS) is a numerical ocean prediction system that operationally produces analyses, reanalyses and short-term forecasts of the main physical parameters for the entire Mediterranean Sea and its Atlantic Ocean adjacent areas. This work is specifically focused on the description and evaluation of the analysis and forecast modeling system that covers the analysis of the current situation and produces daily updates of the following 10 days forecast. The system has been recently upgraded in the framework of the Copernicus Marine Environment Monitoring Service (CMEMS) by increasing the grid resolution from 1/16o to 1/24o in the horizontal and from 72 to 141 vertical levels, by increasing the number of fresh water river inputs and by updating the data assimilation scheme. The model has a non-linear explicit free surface and it is forced by surface pressure, interactive heat, momentum and water fluxes at the air-sea interface. In order to validate the modeling system and to estimate the accuracy of the model products, a quality assessment is regularly performed including both pre-operational qualification and near real time (NRT) validation procedures. Pre-operational qualification activities focus on testing the improvements of the quality of the new system with respect to the previous version and relies on past simulation and historical data, while NRT validation activities aim at routinely and on-line providing the skill assessment of the model analysis and forecasts and relies on the NRT available observations. The focus of this work is to present the new operational modeling system and the skill assessment including comparison with independent (insitu coastal moorings) and quasi-independent (insitu vertical profiles and satellite) datasets.

Description: Published

Description: Bergen, Norway

Description: 3SR. AMBIENTE - Servizi e ricerca per la Società

Description: Accurate estimates of the atmosphere–ocean fluxes of greenhouse gases and dimethyl sulphide (DMS) have great importance in climate change models. A significant part of these fluxes occur at the coastal ocean which, although much smaller than the open ocean, have more heterogeneous conditions. Hence, Earth System Modelling (ESM) requires representing the oceans at finer resolutions which, in turn, requires better descriptions of the chemical, physical and biological processes. The standard formulations for the solubilities and gas transfer velocities across air–water surfaces are 36 and 24 years old, and new alternatives have emerged. We have developed a framework combining the related geophysical processes and choosing from alternative formulations with different degrees of complexity. The framework was tested with fine resolution data from the European coastal ocean. Although the benchmark and alternative solubility formulations generally agreed well, their minor divergences yielded differences of up to 5.8% for CH4 dissolved at the ocean surface. The transfer velocities differ strongly (often more than 100%), a consequence of the benchmark empirical wind-based formulation disregarding significant factors that were included in the alternatives. We conclude that ESM requires more comprehensive simulations of atmosphere–ocean interactions, and that further calibration and validation is needed for the formulations to be able to reproduce it. We propose this framework as a basis to update with formulations for processes specific to the air–water boundary, such as the presence of surfactants, rain, the hydration reaction or biological activity.

Description: Published

Description: id 310

Description: 4A. Oceanografia e clima

Description: JCR Journal