Variability of Coastal and Ocean Water Temperature in the Upper 700 m along the Western Iberian Peninsula from 1975 to 2006

Temperature is observed to have different trends at coastal and ocean locations along the western Iberian Peninsula from 1975 to 2006, which corresponds to the last warming period in the area under study. The analysis was carried out by means of the Simple Ocean Data Assimilation (SODA). Reanalysis data are available at monthly scale with a horizontal resolution of 0.5 degrees x0.5 degrees and a vertical resolution of 40 levels, which allows obtaining information beneath the sea surface. Only the first 21 vertical levels (from 5.0 m to 729.35 m) were considered here, since the most important changes in heat content observed for the world ocean during the last decades, correspond to the upper 700 m. Warming was observed to be considerably higher at ocean locations than at coastal ones. Ocean warming ranged from values on the order of 0.3 degrees C dec(-1) near surface to less than 0.1 degrees C dec(-1) at 500 m, while coastal warming showed values close to 0.2 degrees C dec(-1) near surface, decreasing rapidly below 0.1 degrees C dec(-1) for depths on the order of 50 m. The heat content anomaly for the upper 700 m, showed a sharp increase from coast (0.46 Wm(-2)) to ocean (1.59 Wm(-2)). The difference between coastal and ocean values was related to the presence of coastal upwelling, which partially inhibits the warming from surface of near shore water. Citation: Santos F, Gomez-Gesteira M, deCastro M, Alvarez I (2012) Variability of Coastal and Ocean Water Temperature in the Upper 700 m along the Western Iberian Peninsula from 1975 to 2006. PLoS ONE 7(12): e50666. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0050666