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Timeseries activity within Mersea

• Why Timeseries Observations?
  
  

• Atlantic stations
  
  

• Mediterranean Stations
  

MERSEA is building an operational system for ocean monitoring and forecasting, which includes biogeochemical and ecosystem aspects of the ocean. At present, there are no routine in-situ observations available, both in the open ocean and in the Mediterranean, which can detect changes in nutrient concentrations (impossible to see from space), or which can quantify chlorophyll abundance (needed to validate satellite estimates which may have large errors). To document the temporal changes or events in key ecosystem variables in typical or representative locations, timeseries moorings at present are the only methodology.

The approach for MERSEA is to set up and operate a system for collecting and providing such data from three locations in the open Atlantic and the three locations in the Mediterranean. Data at a few points are not useful for assimilating. Instead, these physical and biogeochemical data will be used to test models being developed, to validate system forecasts, to assess the performance of the system, and to detect changes in some key regions of interest to Europe. In some sense, they will serve as ocean reference stations, similar to the meteorological ones for air-sea flux observations.

At a global level, the true value of such timeseries stations will come from a sustained global network, being developed under the OceanSITES program.