POSEIDON team participation in EGU General Assembly, April 2023

POSEIDON team participation in EGU General Assembly, April 2023

Date
05/05/2023


During the General Assembly of the European Geophysical Union (EGU) 2023 in Vienna, two presentations were given by members of the POSEIDON scientific team:

“Validation of the Copernicus Marine Med-WAV modelled spectrum with available buoy measurements in the Mediterranean Sea”

Charikleia Oikonomou presented a study conducted by the Mediterranean Wave Forecasting Team at HCMR (Med-WAV) under the Copernicus Marine Environment Service. The work aims to inform potential users about the availability of wave spectra and their representability against in situ spectra. The motivation for this work is the users' need for an accurate spectral representation of waves in the Mediterranean Sea, as wave spectra provide additional information about the sea state, can be used for downscaling applications, and are of practical interest to offshore engineers. The study concluded that wave spectra produced by Med-WAV can represent deep-water buoy spectral shapes to a satisfactory level, while wave periods of practical interest are also found to be reliable.

https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu23-13365

“Extreme Marine Summers in the Mediterranean Sea”

Dimitra Denaxa presented a study of the warmest summers that the surface of the Mediterranean Sea has experienced in recent decades. This work proposes the concept of "Extreme Marine Summers" in the Mediterranean Sea and examines their characteristics in a climatological framework for the period 1950-2020. The background of the study is the recent findings of sea surface temperature (SST) increase in the Mediterranean Sea, which exceeds that of the global oceans and has devastating effects on marine life, especially during the summer months. Results presented include an examination of the structure of daily SST values during Extreme Marine Summers in the Mediterranean, the role of marine heat waves in their development, and the contribution of air-sea heat exchange in the evolution of extreme summers. 

https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu23-6923

Figure 1 Left: Example of modelled 2D spectra, normalised form (Med-WAV wave model - 32 frequencies, 24 directions); right: visualisation of spectral density as a function of wave frequency.

Figure 2 top panel: Time-series of the Mediterranean basin-averaged summer sea surface temperature over the period 1950-2020; bottom panel: Sea surface temperature anomaly (oC) of Extreme Marine Summers with respect to climatology in the Mediterranean Sea, based on ECMWF ERA5 Reanalysis dataset for 1950-2020.