ICES Report on Ocean Climate 2008

The North Atlantic region is unusual in having a relatively large number of locations at which oceanographic data have repeatedly been collected for many years or decades; the longest records go back more than a century. In this report, we provide the very latest information from the ICES Area of the North Atlantic and Nordic Seas, where the ocean is currently measured regularly. We describe the status of sea temperature and salinity during 2008, as well as the observed trends over the past decade or longer. In the first part of the report, we draw together the information from the longest time-series in order to give the best possible overview of changes in the ICES Area. Throughout the report, additional complementary datasets are provided, such as sea level pressure, air temperature, and ice cover.
The main focus of the annual ICES Report on Ocean Climate is the observed variability in the upper ocean (the upper 1000 m), and the introductory section includes gridded fields constructed by optimal analysis of the Argo float data distributed by the Coriolis data centre, in France. Later in the report, there is a short section summarizing the variability of the intermediate and deep waters of the North Atlantic.
The data presented here represent an accumulation of knowledge collected by many individuals and institutions through decades of observations. It would be impossible to list them all, but at the end of the report, we provide a list of contacts for each dataset, including e-mail addresses for the individuals who provided the information, and the data centres at which the full archives of data are held.