The R/V Miguel Oliver was built in 2007 for scientific fisheries assessment and oceanographic research purposes. Owned by the Spanish General Secretariat of Fisheries, it mainly operates around the Iberian Peninsula and Canary Islands waters. Equipped with an automatic weather station, collected data are daily sent to the Spanish Institute of Oceanography (IEO) Data Center / National Oceanographic Data Center (NODC) for delayed-mode quality control and long-term archive and dissemination. Recently, a semi-automatic process has been used to perform quality control and data assessment. The quality controlled data have been stored in MEDAR/MEDATLAS format, and the corresponding quality flag has been added to each individual measurement. This facilitates their reuse for different purposes, from climatology or academic studies to industrial sector needs, among others. In 2023, air temperature, relative humidity, wind speed and direction and solar radiation were collected.

The DBCP – Data Buoy Cooperation Panel - is an international program coordinating the use of autonomous data buoys to observe atmospheric and oceanographic conditions, over ocean areas where few other measurements are taken. DBCP coordinates the global array of 1 600 active drifting buoys (August 2020) and historical observation from 14 000 drifting buoys. Data and metadata collected by drifting buoys are publically available in near real-time via the Global Data Assembly Centers (GDACs) in Coriolis-Ifremer (France) and MEDS (Canada) after an automated quality control (QC). In long term, scientifically quality controlled delayed mode data will be distributed on the GDACs. Disclaimer: the DB-GDAC is under construction. It is currently (January 2020) aggregating data from the Coriolis DAC (E-Surfmar, Canada). Additional DACs are considered. An interim provision from GTS real-time data to GDAC may be provided from Coriolis DAC.  

These monthly gridded climatology were produced using MBT, XBT, Profiling floats, Gliders, and ship-based CTD data from different database and carried out in the Med. between 1969 and 2013. The Mixed Layer Depth (MLD) is calculated with a delta T= 0.1 C criterion relative to 10m reference level on individual profiles. The Depth of the Bottom of the Seasonal Thermocline (DBST) is calculated on individual profiles as the maximum value from a vector composed of two elements: 1) the depth of the temperature minimum in the upper 200m; 2) the MLD. This double criterion for the calculation of DBST is necessary in areas where the mixed layer exceed 200m depth. DBST is the integration depth used in the calculation of the upper-ocean Heat Storage Rate. For more details about the data and the methods used, see: Houpert et al. 2015, Seasonal cycle of the mixed layer, the seasonal thermocline and the upper-ocean heat storage rate in the Mediterranean Sea derived from observations, Progress in Oceanography, http://doi.org/10.1016/j.pocean.2014.11.004