EMODNET PRELIMINARY HIGH RESOLUTION TEMPERATURE AND SALINITY CLIMATOLOGIES FOR THE NORTHERN ADRIATIC SEA

Abstract

The proposed study, conducted in the framework of EMODnet - Physics, presents a preliminary high-resolution climatology of temperature and salinity for the Northern Adriatic Sea. The input data are co-located temperature and salinity profiles integrated from SeaDataCloud (Simoncelli et al., 2020a and 2020b) and CORA5.2 (Szekely et al.,2019) historical datasets. The analysis was performed with the DIVAnd software (Data-Interpolating Variational Analysis in n dimensions, Barth et al., 2014) version 2.6.1. Monthly and seasonal fields are calculated for the periods 1955-2016, 1955-1984 and 1985-2016, while seasonal fields are provided for 6 decades from 1955 to 2016. The climatological fi elds are computed on a regular grid of 3 km of horizontal resolution on 11 vertical layers. The preliminary results show a significant impact of horizontal resolution on the detection of small-scale patterns of temperature and salinity fields, but they also outline criticalities due to both spatial and temporal data gaps in particular along the Croatian coast and in the last decade. Further developments will consider the integration of other datasets in order to reduce such gaps and to increase the resolution of the climatological products.