EU‐sponsored effort improves monitoring of circulation variability in the Mediterranean

Abstract

The Mediterranean Sea, bordered by many North African countries and opening eastward to the Black Sea, is a strategic area for Europe. Its coast is one of the most heavily populated regions of the world. A large part of a coastal nation's gross national product is produced through fishing, transportation, recreation, and other industries that depend on a healthy marine coastal environment. The risk of an incident likely to release harmful substances and cause massive pollution is considered high, as the Mediterranean is a major route for merchant vessels and the transport of oil and gas. Due to this risk, Mediterranean coastal countries need to organize and prepare for accidental marine pollution. Such permanent efforts have to be made at national, regional, and European levels. The management of this culturally diverse area presents a challenge.

High resolution nested model for the Cyprus, NE Levantine Basin, eastern Mediterranean Sea: implementation and climatological runs

“…8), reveals that the water column responds to the seasonal variations of the surface fluxes at great depths, causing the winter homogenisation of the waters from the surface down to 100 m depth and the establishment of the strong summer thermocline down to 40-50 m depth. The thermohaline structure simulated by the CYCOM is of particular interest and shows similar water mass distribution, characterizing the study area, such as those found during the renewed in situ observational investigations of the SE Levantine Basin, between 1995-2001 within the frame of the CYBO, CY-CLOPS and MFSPP projects (Zodiatis et al, 1998a;Zodiatis et al, 2001;Manzella et al, 2001). The surface saline waters and the LIW were found to occupy the eastern part of the model domain, while the western part of the model domain is intruded by the MAW, which is transferred in the area by the MMJ.…”

Assimilation scheme of the Mediterranean Forecasting System: operational implementation

“…4). The assimilation cycle is chosen to be a week, consistent with the XBT data distribution (Manzella et al, 2001) and the SLA data availability .…”

“…The XBT data are collected along seven tracks with an along-track spatial nominal resolution of 12 nm (Manzella et al, 2001). Each track was repeated once per month from September 1999 until December 1999 and twice per month from January until June 2000 (with the exception of the track crossing longitudinally all the basin that was made only once a month).…”

“…The NRT observations consist of: (a) satellite data for sea surface temperature (SST) and sea level anomaly (SLA); (b) vertical temperature profiles by Expandable BathyTermograph (XBT) collected along the 7 VOS routes described by Manzella et al (2001). The meteorological parameters used in the MFSPP forecast are: mean sea level pressure, total cloud cover, zonal and meridional wind components at 10 m, temperature at 2 m and dew point temperature at 2 m. In this section we describe briefly the data collection and preprocessing procedures for the different data sets.…”

“…The observing system is described in Manzella et al (2001) for the Voluntary Observing Ship (VOS), and Le Traon and Ogor (1998) for the satellite data. The ocean general circulation model (OGCM) of the basin scale forecasting system is presented in Demirov and Pinardi (2002).…”