Sea surface currents a key variable to improve marine environmental assesment and forecasts in marine emergencies

Abstract

Surface currents are essential to many transport phenomena in the ocean. Atmosphere-ocean fluxes, pollutant distribution, pelagic fauna, and drifting buoyant objects essentially depend on surface currents. Monitoring the surface currents are thus necessary for a great variety of natural processes and for an adequate management of the marine environment. In this work we illustrate the importance of having reliable sea surface currents through two use cases. The first deals with an assessment of oil spills for the whole Mediterranean basin computing beaching probability maps of lagrangian particles based on hindcast of sea surface velocity fields. In the second case we show how to obtain high resolution sea surface currents to improve short time forecasts in marine emergencies through the application of recent developments from the surface quasigeostrophic theory (SQG)