Datensatz

Zusammenfassung

The Mediterranean Sea is well-known for its sensitivity to climate change, leading to extensive efforts in monitoring the basin as a whole. However, the Mediterranean is composed of individual sub-basins that exhibit different roles in its conveyor belt’s function. Additionally, impacts on societies and ecosystems have been shown to depend primarily on local manifestation of global-scale changes. Thus, sufficient risk assessment and the development of feasible adaptation strategies require regional studies, especially in sub-basins with high population density along their coastlines. The Tyrrhenian basin, one of the main mixing areas of the Mediterranean, is among the most densely populated semi-enclosed basins, yet it remains the least investigated. This work addresses this issue and provides new regional products, implementing information about the state, long-term variability, and changes in the surface and sub-surface layers of the Tyrrhenian Sea, while considering the potential role of local forcing as well as large-scale climatic patterns. Essential surface monitoring indicators, such as sea surface temperature, sea level anomaly, geostrophic currents, and air-sea interactions, were assessed using satellite, reanalysis, and in-situ data over the last four decades. Corresponding sub-surface indicators, including ocean heat and salt contents and water mass physical properties, were also computed based on more than 750000 hydrographic stations. A dedicated website was created to distribute these indicators, the regional dataset and the corresponding climatologies in order to respond to the increasing needs for directly usable regional products and to provide a reference baseline for the Tyrrhenian Sea.