SOMOVAR

The SOMOVAR project (2017-2019, LEFE-GMMC/IMAGO) objective is to investigate the mechanisms of variability of the North Atlantic Subtropical Gyre system at interannual-to-decadal time scales for the understanding of changes in observed oceanic heat content.

The North Atlantic subtropical gyre holds the largest volume of warm water in the world's ocean mid-latitudes. It plays an important role for climate at the global and regional scales through its participation in the meridional heat transport, air-sea fluxes and heat storage. It is thus crucial to know how the North Atlantic subtropical gyre have and will change in the face of climate change.

The consortium of physical oceanographers, climatologists and statisticians leading this project have recently developed innovative methods to diagnose objectively the properties of the NATSG thermodynamical system. These methods, based on pattern recognition or unsupervised classification, strengthen our ability to diagnose long-term changes to the NASTG and provide a data-driven model for the ocean interior structure. We believe these methods can provide a new perspective on remarkable structures in the ocean vertical stratification, their regional distributions and their variability, hence contributing to our ocean dynamic understanding.

SOMOVAR activities:

WP1: Observed variability of the NASTG (LOPS, Univ. Alberta)

Check out the EDW monitoring webpage

WP2: Projected changes of the NASTG (Cerfacs, LOPS)

WP3: Mechanisms of NASTG variability: process study (LOPS, Cerfacs)

WP4: A new perspective on Western Boundary Currents observed variability (LOPS, Lab-STICC)