Title

Mediterranean Sea Surface Temperature time series and trend from Observations Reprocessing

Alternate title

MEDSEA_OMI_TEMPSAL_sst_area_averaged_anomalies

Date (Creation)

2019-11-28

Edition

3.4

Edition date

2024-11-26

Citation identifier

a78600a4-a280-47b5-8ddd-0dc8b5e9c9d9

Abstract

'''DEFINITION'''

The medsea_omi_tempsal_sst_area_averaged_anomalies product for 2023 includes unfiltered Sea Surface Temperature (SST) anomalies, given as monthly mean time series starting on 1982 and averaged over the Mediterranean Sea, and 24-month filtered SST anomalies, obtained by using the X11-seasonal adjustment procedure (see e.g. Pezzulli et al., 2005; Pisano et al., 2020). This OMI is derived from the CMEMS Reprocessed Mediterranean L4 SST satellite product (SST_MED_SST_L4_REP_OBSERVATIONS_010_021, see also the OMI QUID, http://marine.copernicus.eu/documents/QUID/CMEMS-OMI-QUID-MEDSEA-SST.pdf), which provides the SSTs used to compute the evolution of SST anomalies (unfiltered and filtered) over the Mediterranean Sea. This reprocessed product consists of daily (nighttime) optimally interpolated 0.05° grid resolution SST maps over the Mediterranean Sea built from the ESA Climate Change Initiative (CCI) (Merchant et al., 2019) and Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) initiatives, including also an adjusted version of the AVHRR Pathfinder dataset version 5.3 (Saha et al., 2018) to increase the input observation coverage. Anomalies are computed against the 1991-2020 reference period. The 30-year climatology 1991-2020 is defined according to the WMO recommendation (WMO, 2017) and recent U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration practice (https://wmo.int/media/news/updated-30-year-reference-period-reflects-changing-climate). The reference for this OMI can be found in the first and second issue of the Copernicus Marine Service Ocean State Report (OSR), Section 1.1 (Roquet et al., 2016; Mulet et al., 2018).

'''CONTEXT'''

Sea surface temperature (SST) is a key climate variable since it deeply contributes in regulating climate and its variability (Deser et al., 2010). SST is then essential to monitor and characterise the state of the global climate system (GCOS 2010). Long-term SST variability, from interannual to (multi-)decadal timescales, provides insight into the slow variations/changes in SST, i.e. the temperature trend (e.g., Pezzulli et al., 2005). In addition, on shorter timescales, SST anomalies become an essential indicator for extreme events, as e.g. marine heatwaves (Hobday et al., 2018). The Mediterranean Sea is a climate change hotspot (Giorgi F., 2006). Indeed, Mediterranean SST has experienced a continuous warming trend since the beginning of 1980s (e.g., Pisano et al., 2020; Pastor et al., 2020). Specifically, since the beginning of the 21st century (from 2000 onward), the Mediterranean Sea featured the highest SSTs and this warming trend is expected to continue throughout the 21st century (Kirtman et al., 2013).

'''KEY FINDINGS'''

During 2023, the Mediterranean Sea continued experiencing the intense sea surface temperatures’ warming (marine heatwave event) that started in May 2022 (Marullo et al., 2023). The basin average SST anomaly was 0.9 ± 0.1 °C in 2023, the highest in this record. The Mediterranean SST warming started in May 2022, when the mean anomaly increased abruptly from 0.01 °C (April) to 0.76 °C (May), reaching the highest values during June (1.66 °C) and July (1.52 °C), and persisting until summer 2023 with anomalies around 1 °C above the 1991-2020 climatology. The peak of July 2023 (1.76 °C) set the record of highest SST anomaly ever recorded since 1982. The 2022/2023 Mediterranean marine heatwave is comparable to that occurred in 2003 (see e.g. Olita et al., 2007) in terms of anomaly magnitude but longer in duration.

Over the period 1982-2023, the Mediterranean SST has warmed at a rate of 0.041 ± 0.001 °C/year, which corresponds to an average increase of about 1.7 °C during these last 42 years. Within its error (namely, the 95% confidence interval), this warming trend is consistent with recent trend estimates in the Mediterranean Sea (Pisano et al., 2020; Pastor et al., 2020). However, though the linear trend being constantly increasing during the whole period, the picture of the Mediterranean SST trend in 2022 seems to reveal a restarting after the pause occurred in the last years (since 2015-2021).

'''DOI (product):'''

https://doi.org/10.48670/moi-00268

Credit

E.U. Copernicus Marine Service Information

Point of contact

Organisation name	Individual name	Electronic mail address	Role
SST-CNR-ROMA-IT			Production Unit

Maintenance and update frequency

Annually

Other

P0M0D0H/P0M0D0H

Maintenance note

N/A

GEMET - INSPIRE themes, version 1.0

• Oceanographic geographical features

Discipline

• satellite-observation

Climate and Forecast Standard Names

• sea_surface_temperature

Temporal scale

• multi-year

Area of benefit

• weather-climate-and-seasonal-forecasting
• coastal-marine-environment
• marine-safety
• marine-resources

Reference Geographical Areas

• mediterranean-sea

Processing level

• N/A

Model assimilation

• Not Applicable

Use limitation

See Copernicus Marine Environment Monitoring Service Data commitments and licence at: http://marine.copernicus.eu/web/27-service-commitments-and-licence.php

Access constraints

Other restrictions

Use constraints

License

Other legal constraints

No limitations on public access

Title

Giorgi, F., 2006. Climate change hot-spots. Geophys. Res. Lett., 33:L08707, https://doi.org/10.1029/2006GL025734

Date (Creation)

2019-05-08

Association Type

Cross reference

Initiative Type

Reference

Title

Deser, C., Alexander, M. A., Xie, S.-P., Phillips, A. S., 2010. Sea Surface Temperature Variability: Patterns and Mechanisms. Annual Review of Marine Science 2010 2:1, 115-143. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-marine-120408-151453

Date (Creation)

2019-05-08

Association Type

Cross reference

Initiative Type

Reference

Title

GCOS. Global Climate Observing System. 2010. Update of the Implementation Plan for the Global Observing System for Climate in Support of the UNFCCC (GCO-138).

Date (Creation)

2019-05-08

Association Type

Cross reference

Initiative Type

Reference

Aggregate Datasetindentifier

44f025aa-ea29-45d3-b10d-575b774f02ce

Association Type

Cross reference

Initiative Type

Document

Aggregate Datasetindentifier

5a6a4d6a-72ba-4a94-b486-7d8afd53842f

Association Type

Cross reference

Initiative Type

Document

Aggregate Datasetindentifier

49619510-626d-4083-b44c-7c77cb0da567

Association Type

Cross reference

Initiative Type

Document

Title

Hobday, A. J., Oliver, E. C., Gupta, A. S., Benthuysen, J. A., Burrows, M. T., Donat, M. G., ... & Smale, D. A. (2018). Categorizing and naming marine heatwaves. Oceanography, 31(2), 162-173.

Date (Creation)

2019-05-08

Association Type

Cross reference

Initiative Type

Reference

Title

Merchant, C. J., Embury, O., Bulgin, C. E., Block, T., Corlett, G. K., Fiedler, E., ... & Eastwood, S. (2019). Satellite-based time-series of sea-surface temperature since 1981 for climate applications. Scientific data, 6(1), 1-18.

Date (Creation)

2019-05-08

Association Type

Cross reference

Initiative Type

Reference

Title

Mulet, S., Buongiorno Nardelli, B., Good, S., Pisano, A., Greiner, E., Monier, M., Autret, E., Axell, L., Boberg, F., Ciliberti, S., Drévillon, M., Droghei, R., Embury, O., Gourrion, J., Høyer, J., Juza, M., Kennedy, J., Lemieux-Dudon, B., Peneva, E., Reid, R., Simoncelli, S., Storto, A., Tinker, J., Von Schuckmann, K., Wakelin, S. L., 2018. Ocean temperature and salinity. In: Copernicus Marine Service Ocean State Report, Issue 2, Journal of Operational Oceanography, 11:sup1, s5–s13, DOI: 10.1080/1755876X.2018.1489208

Date (Creation)

2019-05-08

Association Type

Cross reference

Initiative Type

Reference

Title

Pezzulli, S., Stephenson, D. B., Hannachi, A., 2005. The Variability of Seasonality. J. Climate. 18:71–88. doi:10.1175/JCLI-3256.1.

Date (Creation)

2019-05-08

Association Type

Cross reference

Initiative Type

Reference

Title

Roquet, H., Pisano, A., Embury, O., 2016. Sea surface temperature. In: von Schuckmann et al. 2016, The Copernicus Marine Environment Monitoring Service Ocean State Report, Jour. Operational Ocean., vol. 9, suppl. 2. doi:10.1080/1755876X.2016.1273446.

Date (Creation)

2019-05-08

Association Type

Cross reference

Initiative Type

Reference

Title

Saha, Korak; Zhao, Xuepeng; Zhang, Huai-min; Casey, Kenneth S.; Zhang, Dexin; Baker-Yeboah, Sheekela; Kilpatrick, Katherine A.; Evans, Robert H.; Ryan, Thomas; Relph, John M. (2018). AVHRR Pathfinder version 5.3 level 3 collated (L3C) global 4km sea surface temperature for 1981-Present. NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information. Dataset. https://doi.org/10.7289/v52j68xx

Date (Creation)

2019-05-08

Association Type

Cross reference

Initiative Type

Reference

Title

Sen, P. K., 1968. Estimates of the regression coefficient based on Kendall’s tau. J Am Statist Assoc. 63:1379–1389.

Date (Creation)

2019-05-08

Association Type

Cross reference

Initiative Type

Reference

Title

Pisano, A., Marullo, S., Artale, V., Falcini, F., Yang, C., Leonelli, F. E., Santoleri, R. and Buongiorno Nardelli, B.: New Evidence of Mediterranean Climate Change and Variability from Sea Surface Temperature Observations, Remote Sens., 12(1), 132, doi:10.3390/rs12010132, 2020.

Date (Creation)

2019-05-08

Association Type

Cross reference

Initiative Type

Reference

Title

Pastor, F., Valiente, J. A., & Khodayar, S. (2020). A Warming Mediterranean: 38 Years of Increasing Sea Surface Temperature. Remote Sensing, 12(17), 2687.

Date (Creation)

2019-05-08

Association Type

Cross reference

Initiative Type

Reference

Title

Olita, A., Sorgente, R., Natale, S., Gaberšek, S., Ribotti, A., Bonanno, A., & Patti, B. (2007). Effects of the 2003 European heatwave on the Central Mediterranean Sea: surface fluxes and the dynamical response. Ocean Science, 3(2), 273-289.

Date (Creation)

2019-05-08

Association Type

Cross reference

Initiative Type

Reference

Title

Sen, P. K., 1968. Estimates of the regression coefficient based on Kendall’s tau. J Am Statist Assoc. 63:1379–1389.

Date (Creation)

2019-05-08

Association Type

Cross reference

Initiative Type

Reference

Language

eng

Topic category

• Oceans

Description

bounding box

Begin date

1982-01-01

Supplemental Information

display priority: 53800

Codespace

EPSG

Number of dimensions

2

Dimension name

Row

Dimension name

Column

Cell geometry

Area

Transformation parameter availability

Distribution format

Name	Version
NetCDF-4

OnLine resource

Protocol	Linkage	Name
WWW:STAC	https://stac.marine.copernicus.eu/metadata/MEDSEA_OMI_TEMPSAL_sst_area_averaged_anomalies/medsea_omi_tempsal_sst_area_averaged_anomalies_202311/dataset.stac.json	medsea_omi_tempsal_sst_area_averaged_anomalies
OGC:WMTS	https://wmts.marine.copernicus.eu/teroWmts/MEDSEA_OMI_TEMPSAL_sst_trend/medsea_omi_tempsal_sst_trend_202311?service=WTMS&request=GetCapabilities	medsea_omi_tempsal_sst_area_averaged_anomalies

Hierarchy level

Series

Statement

The myOcean products depends on other products for production or validation. The detailed list of dependencies is given in ISO19115's aggregationInfo (ISO19139 Xpath = "gmd:MD_Metadata/gmd:identificationInfo/gmd:aggregationInfo[./gmd:MD_AggregateInformation/gmd:initiativeType/gmd:DS_InitiativeTypeCode/@codeListValue='upstream-validation' or 'upstream-production']")

Attribute description

observation

Content type

Physical measurement

Descriptor

vertical level number: 1

Descriptor

temporal resolution: monthly mean

Included with dataset

Feature types

Point series

Metadata

File identifier

2b3f56af-9159-4f81-acbf-eeb3cb016866

Metadata language

English

Character set

UTF8

Hierarchy level

Series

Hierarchy level name

Copernicus Marine Service product specification

Date stamp

2025-04-22T09:07:00.512564Z

Metadata standard name

ISO 19139, MyOcean profile

Metadata standard version

0.2

Metadata author

Organisation name	Individual name	Electronic mail address	Role
CMEMS		servicedesk.cmems@mercator-ocean.eu	Local service desk