Emilio García-Ladona

• Researcher
• Senior Researcher at Institut de Ciències del Mar

Since 2003, with the aim of addressing different issues related to otoliths and the advancement of technologies, AFORO acronym of Anàlisi de FORmes d'Otòlits (otolith shape analysis), a computational environment with a set of tools including a website for this purpose, has gradually expanded its functionality. This implies different ways to measure...

Anomalous warming of the upper ocean is increasingly being observed in the Mediterranean Sea. Extreme events, known as marine heatwaves (MHWs), can have a profound impact on marine ecosystems, and their correct detection and characterization are crucial to define future impact scenarios. Here, we analyze MHWs observed over the last 41 years (1982–2...

Oceanographic data such as wave conditions (height, period, direction), wind, and sea currents are often difficult to interpret. What is the sea state given a certain wave height, wave directional spreading, and wind speed (e.g., 2 m, 29º, 18 m/s)? An expert user might be able to imagine the sea conditions with such information, but this will be al...

Extreme and prolonged increases in the sea temperature, a marine heatwave (MHW), are detected by comparison with historical values at each location and time of year. Thus, the correct estimation of reference values is key in detecting marine heatwaves. In temporally separated epochs comparison, it is necessary to consider two contributions to the e...

The definition of a sensor monitoring strategy is based on the location for water monitoring, sensor performances, data storage and transmission. For any new sensor, available instruments currently used in oceanographic studies are identified to perform comparisons. Suitable transmission technology is selected according to the test conditions: open...

This document reports the technical aspects relative to the format specifications for data exchange information among different institutions during the Project "Corrientes Oceánicas y Seguridad en el Medio MarinO" (COSMO, CTM2016-79774-R). The project MEDOSMOSIS (6MED20 4.1 SP 005) has funded the English translation of this manuscript.

Sea surface currents probably are the most relevant essential ocean variable affecting diversesocietal challenges concerning the marine environmental (as, for example, safe and efficientnavigation, marine pollution and ecological connectivity). This work introduces a climatologicalAtlas (monthly resolution) of currents in the Mediterranean and Cana...

Current observations of ocean currents are mainly based on altimetric measurements of Sea Surface Heights (SSH), however the characteristics of the present-day constellation of altimeters are only capable to retrieve surface currents at scales larger than 50–70 km. By contrast, infrared and visible radiometers reach spatial resolutions thirty times...

A marine hazard is a potentially damaging event, phenomenon or activity in the marine environment that may cause loss of human life, social and economic disruption or environmental degradation. In the last 30 years, natural and human-induced hazards have caused over 1.6 million victims and the economic losses average 300 thousand million dollars pe...

The knowledge about the variability of the surface ocean currents is essential to support medium and long-term decision-making in a different problem related to the ocean currents: the spills of hydrocarbons or chemical products that can be dumped by ships, oil rigs, or other industries. Traditionally, the prediction of the evolution of the pollut...

The monthly climatological atlas includes surface and subsurface currents and variance matrix at each grid point to provide quantitative information on the variability of currents. The climatological fields are computed using two different current velocity products for the Mediterranean (from altimetry measurements and MEDSEA reanalysis) and one pr...

This paper reviews different approaches to modelling the energy transition towards a zero carbon economy. It identifies a number of limitations in current approaches such as a lack of consideration of out-of-equilibrium situations (like an energy transition) and non-linear feedbacks. To tackle those issues, the new open source integrated assessment...

This paper reviews different approaches to modelling the energy transition towards a zero carbon economy. It identifies a number of limitations in current approaches such as a lack of consideration of out-of-equilibrium situations (like an energy transition) and non-linear feedbacks. To tackle those issues, the new open source integrated assessment...

Surface currents in the Alboran Sea are characterized by a very fast evolution that is not well captured by altimetric maps due to sampling limitations. On the contrary, satellite infrared measurements provide high resolution synoptic images of the ocean at high temporal rate, allowing to capture the evolution of the flow. The capability of Surface...

Surface currents in the Alboran Sea are characterized by a very fast evolution that is not well captured by altimetric maps due to sampling limitations. On the contrary, satellite infrared measurements provide high resolution synoptic images of the ocean at high temporal rate, allowing to capture the evolution of the flow. The capability of Surface...

This report documents the conventions developed on the frame of COSMO project (CTM2016-79474-R) to standardize GeoJSON specifications to encode ocean drifting objects. It encompasses several classes to encode usual oceanographic drifters (CODE,SVP,...) but also trajectories made by dummies in search and rescue exercises or document rescue of human...

Ocean currents play a key role in Earth's climate – they impact almost any process taking place in the ocean and are of major importance for navigation and human activities at sea. Nevertheless, their observation and forecasting are still difficult. First, no observing system is able to provide direct measurements of global ocean currents on synopt...

Ocean currents play a key role in Earth’s climate, they are of major importance for navigation and human activities at sea, and impact almost all processes that take place in the ocean. Nevertheless, their observation and forecasting are still difficult. First, direct measurements of ocean currents are difficult to obtain synoptically at global sca...

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY The COMMON SENSE project has been designed and planned in order to meet the general and specific scientific and technical objectives mentioned in its Description of Work (page 77). As the overall strategy, the 11 work packages (WPs) of the work plan were grouped into 3 key phases: (1) RD basis for cost-effective sensor developmen...

Phytoplankton blooms are events of production and accumulation of phytoplankton biomass that influence ecosystem dynamics and may also have effects on socio-economic activities. Among the biological factors that affect bloom dynamics, prey selection by zooplankton may play an important role. Here we consider the initial state of development of an a...

Since the mid-1980s, physical oceanographers at the Institute of Marine Sciences have been involved in the use of Lagrangian drifters as a complementary technology for their oceanographic research. As Lagrangian observations became more feasible, these researchers continued developing their own drifters in what was to be the seed of current technol...

The main circulation patterns in the western Mediterranean are revisited and updated. The schemes are based on the previous literature, adapted and reviewed. The update concerns in particular the circulation at intermediate depths, exemplified by the Levantine Intermediate Water circulation, and includes deep water cascading and recent observations...

In this work we report short-term measurements of the thermohaline structure and velocity field inside a narrow submarine canyon by means of a yo-yo-like profiler. An Aqualog profiler was deployed inside the Besòs Canyon in the northwestern Mediterranean continental margin, providing a unique data set on the vertical evolution of water column chara...

In this chapter, different kinds of oil spill beaching maps are proposed for the Mediterranean. These beaching maps can be useful as a complementary tool to vulnerability analysis and risk assessment in the Mediterranean. Firstly, it is defined an oil beaching map for a single point, which is the situation, for example, in the analysis of an oil pl...

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY In its overall strategy, COMMON SENSE work packages (11) can be grouped into 3 key phases: (1) RD basis for cost-effective sensor development, (2) Sensor development, sensor web platform and integration, and (3) Field testing. In the Phase 1, within WP1 and WP2, partners have provided a general understanding and integrated basis f...

The circulation in the Algerian Basin is characterized by the presence of fresh-core eddies that propagate along the coast or at distances between 100 and 200 km from the coast. Enhancements in the processing of the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) data have allowed to produce, for the first time, satellite sea surface salinity (SSS) maps in...

An exhaustive validation of some of the operational ocean forecast products available in the Gibraltar Strait and the Alboran Sea is here presented. The skill of two ocean model solutions (derived from the Eulerian ocean forecast systems, such as the regional CMEMS IBI and the high resolution PdE SAMPA) in reproducing the complex surface dynamics i...

On 9 September 2014, an intensive drifter deployment was carried out in the Strait of Gibraltar. In the frame of the EU MED Program MEDESS-4MS, the MEDESS-GIB experiment consisted of the deployment of 35 satellite tracked drifters, mostly of CODE-type, equipped with temperature sensor sampling at a rate of 30 min. Drifters were distributed along an...

On 9 September 2014, an intensive drifter deployment was carried out in the Strait of Gibraltar. In the frame of the EU MED Program MEDESS-4MS, the MEDESS-GIB experiment consisted of the deployment of 35 satellite tracked drifters, mostly of CODE-type, equipped with temperature sensor sampling at a rate of 30 min. Drifters were distributed along an...

For the first time a statistical analysis of oil spill beaching is applied to the whole Mediterranean Sea. A series of probability maps of beaching in case of an oil spill incident are proposed as a complementary tool to vulnerability analysis and risk assessment in the whole basin. As a first approach a set of spill source points are selected alon...

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY The COMMON SENSE project has been designed and planned in order to meet the general and specific scientific and technical objectives mentioned in its Description of Work (page 77). In an overall strategy of the work plan, work packages (11) can be grouped into 3 key phases: (1) RD basis for cost-effective sensor development, (2)...

A version of TEOS-10 (Thermodynamic Equation of Seawater - 2010) in JavaScript has been added to GitHub repository (https://github.com/TEOS-10) See TEOS-10 in action at http://www.physocean.icm.csic.es/Utilities/calculators/teos-ca.html

The Mediterranean occupies the 0.85% of the marine surface but supports 1/6 of the global marine trade and 1/3 of oil marine trade. The project MEDESS-4MS was designed to build a service devoted to prevent and strength the marine security to face oil pollution events in the Mediterranean. The main objective is the built of a multimodel operational...

In 2003 was created AFORO (http://aforo.cmima.csic.es), an interactive system to deal with shape analysis of fish otoliths and a classification system based on the mathematical properties of the one-dimensional curves describing the otolith contours. The system is connected to a database of complete morphometric (measures and morphological indexes)...

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY The last decade has seen significant growth in the field of sensor networks, which are currently collecting large amounts of environmental data. This data needs to be collected, processed, stored and made available for analysis and interpretation in a manner which is meaningful and accessible to end users and stakeholders with a r...

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY AND STRUCTURE OF THE DELIVERABLE Deliverable 1.4 is aimed at identification of existing and operable observing systems and sensors which are relevant to COMMON SENSE objectives. Report aggregates information on existing observing initiatives, programmes, systems, platforms and sensors. The Report includes: • inventory of previous...

This paper is the outcome of a workshop held in Rome in November 2011 on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the POEM (Physical Oceanography of the Eastern Mediterranean) program. In the workshop discussions, a number of unresolved issues were identified for the physical and biogeochemical properties of the Mediterranean Sea as a whole, i.e., c...

Large oil spills produce major ecological and economic impacts on shorelines depending on the following conditions: (i) persistence of the oil in the environment; (ii) weather and sea conditions; (iii) amount and rate of spillage; (iv) geographical, biological and economic characteristics of the area affected; (v) effectiveness of clean up. Oil spi...

The importance of the Mediterranean Sea for the world ocean has long been recognized. First, the Mediterranean sea has a profound impact on the Atlantic ocean circulation and, consequently, on the global thermohaline conveyor belt. Maps of the Mediterranean salty water tongue exiting from the Gibraltar strait at intermediate depths and spreading th...

Nonlinear phenomena are essential ingredients in many oceanic and atmospheric processes, and successful understanding of them benefits from multidisciplinary collaboration between oceanographers, meteorologists, physicists and mathematicians. The present Special Issue on ``Nonlinear Processes in Oceanic and Atmospheric Flows'' contains selected con...

Automated Taxon Identification (ATI) systems that use a database to identify species or anatomical structures of species from different taxonomical groups have recently been developed. However, few of these works have been applied to marine organisms. In this paper we develop an ATI system for identifying Actynopterigian species from their otolith...

Technology offers easy-to-use satellite data, allowing manipulation and enhancement of the images. There are basically two sorts of remote sensing data users. One kind is mainly interested in doing qualitative studies, so it is enough for them to be able to browse images from data repositories and download the imagery. A high-resolution picture tra...

Linear and non-linear empirical models for salinity (S) are estimated from the Argo temperature (T) and salinity (delayed) data. This study focuses on the reconstruction of salinity in the upper 1200 m of the eastern North Atlantic Ocean, a region characterized by the presence of many different water masses. While previous studies have found it nec...

Transport and mixing properties of surface currents can be detected from altimetric data by both Eulerian and Lagrangian diagnostics. In contrast with Eulerian diagnostics, Lagrangian tools like the local Lyapunov exponents have the advantage of exploiting both spatial and temporal variability of the velocity field and are in principle able to unve...

Nowadays Earth observation satellites provide information about many relevant variables of the ocean-climate system, such as temperature, moisture, aerosols, etc. However, to retrieve the velocity field, which is the most relevant dynamical variable, is still a technological challenge, specially in the case of oceans. New processing techniques, eme...

The surface salinity response to changes of various external forcings and model parameters is investigated in a regional 1/3° configuration of the NEMO-OPA model implemented over the eastern North-Atlantic subtropical Ocean. Fourteen realistic climatological simulations are run. By default, neither relaxation to climatological surface salinity nor...

We summarize recent work on the location of Lagrangian structures in velocity fields obtained from realistic simulations and from satellite altimetry of the surface layers of the Mediterranean sea. Finite-size Lyapunov exponents are found to be useful quantities to characterize stretching and compressing structures, and their implications for mixin...

In many oceanographic studies there is a need to reconstruct a signal from a set of sparse measurements. We propose an algorithm to iteratively approximate the intermediate values between irregularly sampled data, when a set of sparse values at coarser scales is known. This is possible when there is an approximation to a model for the multiresoluti...

Within the tasks devoted to operational oceanography, a tool has been developed to access, visualize and distribute satellite data from an HPRT receiving station located in the Institut de Ciencies del Mar (CMIMA-CSIC). The tool generically called SAIDIN (SAtellite Image Database INterface) has been developed with the purpose to access and provide...

In the recent years, the power of employing singularity analysis of scalar variables to perform pattern recognition in complex images has been evidenced. This approach is particularly useful when the image under study corresponds to a scalar variable submitted to a turbulent flow because, in that case, the arrangement of singularity manifolds corre...

The ESEOO Project, launched after the Prestige crisis, has boosted operational oceanography capacities in Spain, creating new operational oceanographic services and increasing synergies between these new operational tools and already existing systems. In consequence, the present preparedness to face an oil-spill crisis is enhanced, significantly im...

This paper addresses the interpolation of sparse irregular data when these sparse data belong to diff erent scales. We propose an algorithm to iteratively approximate the intermediate values between irregularly sampled data, when a set of sparse values at coarser scales is known. This is possible if there is a characterized model for the multiresol...

[EN] A methodology for recovering salinity from expendable bathythermograph (XBT) data is presented. The procedure exploits climatological relationships between temperature, salinity and depth to build regional characteristic curves by fitting a polynomial function that minimises both the variance of residuals and unknowns. Hence, salinity is compu...

This paper presents a contour-based approach for automatic image registration in satellite oceanography. Accurate image georegistration is an essential step to increase the eff ectiveness of all the image processing methods that aggregate information from diff erent sources, i.e. applying data fusion techniques. In our approach the images descripti...

We demonstrate the potential of monitoring coherent wave fronts on the tropical ocean surface using an advanced detection algorithm applied to visible sunglintaffected imagery from geostationary satellites. Data from MeteoSat are processed with the advanced analysis technique to reveal transient wave activity near and to the west of the Mascarene R...

Recent advances in the theory of turbulence, with the introduction of the Microcanonical Multifractal Formalism has favored the development of new techniques for the analysis of remotely sensed data, particularly of scalers as SST. In this work we show that these techniques allow to uncover a fascinating picture in which many features of global oce...

1] Oceans and 2D turbulence present similar characteristics, as for instance the dominant role played by eddies in energy and matter transport. However, providing a complete justification of this analogy is difficult, as it requires knowledge of the ocean's dynamic state at different instants and over large scales. Recently, new techniques coming f...

In this paper we investigate the validity of the multifractal formalism to study sea surface temperature (SST). It is shown that SST patterns observed in moderate resolution SST images have anomalous scaling properties characteristic of a multifractal structure. The most probable origin of the observed structures is the turbulent character of the o...

A realistic 4-year dataset of the surface velocity field of the western Mediterranean Sea obtained with the Mediterranean Forecasting System and the GFDL-MOM model was used to obtain the finite-scale Lyapunov exponents (FSLE) and finite-size diffusion coefficients. Dispersive properties and Lagrangian parameters in four sub-basins are discussed, an...

Velocity probability density functions (PDFs) are a key tool to study complex flows and are of great importance to model particle dispersion. The PDFs of geostrophic velocities derived from sea level anomalies maps for the Mediterranean Sea have been computed and analyzed, guided by recent results found in studies of two-dimensional and geostrophic...

A feature of marine plankton communities is the occurrence of rapid population explosions. When the blooming species are directly or indirectly noxious for humans, these proliferations are denoted as harmful algal blooms (HAB). The importance of biological interactions for the appearance of HABs, in particular when the proliferating microalgae prod...

A multispecies dynamic simulation model (ERSEM) was used to examine the influence of allelopathic and trophic interactions causing feeding avoidance by predators, on the formation of harmful algal blooms, under environmental scenarios typical of a Mediterranean harbour (Barcelona). The biological state variables of the model included four functiona...

We present an automatic system for describing and identifying fish otolith shapes combining information technologies with modern advances in signal analysis. As a major novelty with respect to past studies the system includes wavelets (WT) and curvature space scale (CSS) analyses that have been shown to provide local morphologic information and cha...

We present an automatic system for describing and identifying fish otolith shapes combining information technologies with modern advances in signal analysis. As a major novelty with respect to past studies the system includes wavelets (WT) and curvature space scale (CSS) analyses that have been shown to provide local morphologic information and cha...

The presence of coherent vortices makes observed mesoscale fields of the ocean resemble two-dimensional turbulence. Using this analogy, a common definition of a coherent structure has been used to study the statistical properties of Mediterranean Sea vortices observed by satellite altimeters over a 7-yr period. A vortex has been defined as the simp...

Multifractal or multiaffine analysis is a promising new branch of methods in nonlinear physics for the study of turbulent flows and turbulentlike systems. In this Letter we present a new method based on the multifractal singularity extraction technique, the maximum singular stream-function method (MSSM), which provides a first order approximation t...

Allelopathy among microalgae has been modelled in order to fit the dynamics of mixed cultures of Chrysocromulina polylepis and Heterocapsa triquetra, carried out with three different initial concentrations of the allelopathic species C. polylepis. The experimental data have been analysed with a simple Lotka–Volterra type model including an allelopa...

On November 13th, 2002 the 26 year old tanker Prestige reported an emergency off the North Western Spanish coast (Galicia). The ship was carrying 77,000 tons of heavy fuel oil that started to be spilled while the vessel was towed away from the coast, affecting more than 900 km of shoreline. The location and the way the accident occurred implied a g...

Currents, particle fluxes and ecology were studied in the Palamós submarine canyon (also known as the Fonera canyon), located in the northwestern Mediterranean. Seven mooring arrays equipped with current meters and sediment traps were deployed along the main canyon axis, on the canyon walls and on the adjacent slope. Additionally, local and regiona...

The present study reviewed some of the critical pre-processing steps required for otolith shape characterisation for automatic classification with heterogeneous distributed data. A common procedure for optimising automatic classification is to apply data pre-processing in order to reduce the dimension of vector inputs. One of the key aspects of the...

Fish otolith morphology has been closely related to landmark selection in order to establish the most discriminating points that can help to differentiate or find common characteristics in sets of otolith images. Fourier analysis has traditionally been used to represent otolith images, since it can reconstruct a version of the contour that is close...

Three Algerian eddies (open sea big anticyclonic eddies in the Algerian basin, western Mediterranean sea) are studied in detail using altimetric and in situ data. To characterize their spatial structure we make use of the Okubo–Weiss parameter, which allows to separate the flow into vorticity-dominated and deformation-dominated regions. The applica...

Seven moorings equipped with sediment traps, current meters, and turbidimeters were deployed at selected sites in and outside the Palamós Canyon (Northwest Mediter- ranean). The study lasted from March to November 2001, separated in two 4-month deployments. Moorings were deployed from 400-m to 1700-m depth with instru- ments placed near the bottom...

A procedure is presented to detect eddy cores from sea level anomaly (SLA) maps obtained from altimetric measurements. The method is based on finding the sign of Q, which is an invariant of the velocity gradient tensor (▽u). This parameter, commonly used in studies of two-dimensional turbulence, measures the relative contribution of deformation and...

The properties of Mediterranean eddies (size, circulation, energy, ...) are studied using results of the high resolution MED16 model, which has been developed in the context of the MERCATOR project. The numerical model is an extended version of the primitive equation model OPA (LODYC, Paris) with a rigid lid. It uses a 1/16 degree horizontal grid m...

Current data collected in the region of the Palamós canyon are used to study the flow pattern and variability in the canyon and in the adjacent shelf and slope. Palamós canyon is located in the Catalan coast (northwestern Mediterranean), its axial depth is almost 2000 m, with a total width of about 30 km, implying the canyon has very steep walls. I...

During the autumn–winter of 1996–1997, drifting buoy trajectories and infrared satellite images provided new information on the characteristics of several mesoscale phenomena generated by the Algerian Current (AC) in the western Mediterranean Sea. A mesoscale event, as defined by previous studies, consists of a meander of the current associated wit...

The Algerian Basin is characterised by the presence of mesoscale open-sea eddies generated by the instabilitzation of the Algerian Current. These eddies play a key role to understand the dynamics of the Western Mediterranean sea. Here, their evolution for the period October 1992-October 1999 is systematically analyzed from altimetric maps. First, e...

Mesoscale eddies are a key element to understand the dynamics of the Mediterranean sea, but their role in the general circulation of the basin is not still well understood. In this contribution we present a statistical analysis of the properties of mesoscale eddies observed in Sea Level Anomalies maps for the period October 1992-October 1999. We ha...

En aquest article es fa una descripció dels procediments realitzats per enregistrar dues imatges geomètricament, de forma automàtica, si es pren la primera com a imatge de referència. Es comparen els resultats obtinguts mitjançant tres mètodes. El primer mètode és el d’enregistrament clàssic en domini espacial maximitzant la correlació creuada (MCC...

The Algerian Current (AC) is one of the most energetic flows in the Mediterranean basin. A characteristic picture of this current is formed by a series of mesoscale eddies at different scales. Here, statistical analysis of 15 surface Argos buoy tracks in 1996–1997 provides a complete Lagrangian view of the AC. The buoys, released upstream and acros...

An oceanographic data analysis and visualization tool has been developed in Java and IDL languages using ION (IDL on the Net) interface. This third stage of the project, has focused in building a system, as independent as possible of both the hardware and the operating system, and more easily to customize and reuse. To deal with a certain degree of...

This article explains a methodology to model the spatial structures present in sea surface temperature images, collected from oceanographic satellites, that allows the estimation of sea surface currents. An Eulerian velocity field is built under the assumption that the currents can be diagnosed by the geostrophic equation. The images are preprocess...

Deep slope currents and particulate matter concentrations were studied on the Barcelona continental margin in and around the Foix submarine canyon from May 1993 to April 1994. This year-long moored experiment revealed that near-bottom slope currents are strongly influenced by the bottom topography, being oriented along isobaths and along the canyon...

This paper addresses the problem of motion estimation in sequences of remotely sensed images of the sea. When the temporal sampling period is low the estimation of the velocity field can be done by finding the correspondence between structures detected in the images. The scale space aproximation of these structures using the wavelet multiressolutio...

(http://www.mpae.gwdg.de/EGS/egsga/denhaag99/prg.htm)

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