Atlas of surface currents in the Mediterranean and Canary-Iberian-Biscay waters

Sea surface currents probably are the most relevant essential ocean variable affecting diverse societal challenges concerning the marine environmental (as, for example, safe and efficient navigation, marine pollution and ecological connectivity). This work introduces a climatological Atlas (monthly resolution) of currents in the Mediterranean and Canary-Iberian-Biscay basins, based on today's state of the art reanalyses of the ocean circulation. The focus is on surface and subsurface reanalyses (here understood as z similar to 0.5 and z similar to 15 m, respectively) provided by the Copernicus Marine Environment Monitoring Service (CMEMS). The climatological values are computed from the median of the empirical probability density functions and the Atlas also includes the variance matrix and a bimodality index to have quantitative information on their variability. For both domains, the subsurface climatological fields are reasonably consistent with circulation schemes proposed in the previous literature but dearly improving the time and space resolution of the emerging patterns. For the Canary-Iberian-Biscay domain, the monthly climatological surface currents capture accurately the characteristic seasonal signal and its transition between a favourable and non-favourable upwelling regime. In the Mediterranean basin, differences between the near-surface and the 15 m velocity fields suggest a nonnegligible role of winds over the variability of the uppermost ocean layer, specially in the Eastern Mediterranean basin. This is, up to our knowledge, the first time that such near-surface climatological patterns are computed. It has been found that, in general, the resulting patterns agree with surface drifter trajectories. In several regions, interannual variability foster bimodal and multimodal probability distributions. The Atlas has been conceived with the purpose of providing a first quantitative assessment on the surface circulation, thus being a complementary tool of real-time ocean forecasting systems. The Atlas is distributed following the FAIR principles and is accompanied with a digital version, with enhanced visualization capabilities for both research and assessment.

Automated summary

This work introduces a climatological Atlas of currents in the Mediterranean and Canary-Iberian-Biscay basins, based on state-of-the-art ocean circulation reanalyses. The Atlas provides high-resolution surface and subsurface climatological fields, as well as quantitative information on their variability. The results are consistent with surface drifter trajectories and have important implications for assessing surface circulation.