ICES Report on Ocean Climate 2012

The North Atlantic region is unusual in having a relatively large number of locations at which oceanographic data have been collected repeatedly 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 2012 as well as observed trends over a minimum of the past decade. In the first section 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.