Joaquim Ballabrera

• PhD
• Researcher at Institut de Ciències del Mar

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...

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...

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...

Europe must move towards a 100% renewable transportation system for climate, energy and sustainability reasons. We estimate the capital and energy required for building and operating a renewable transportation system providing similar services as the EU-28 transport system of 2016. It could be based on: biogas or fuel cell vessels; liquid biogas po...

The similarity of mesoscale and submesoscale features observed in different ocean scalars indicates that they undergo some common non-linear processes. As a result of quasi-2D turbulence, complicated patterns of filaments, meanders, and eddies are recognized in remote sensing images. A data fusion method used to improve the quality of one ocean var...

The warming of the Arctic air during summer is an increasingly frequent phenomenon. With surface air temperature exceeding more than 10ºC the mean of the last 40 years, and weekly average temperature values close to this peak value, the melt runoff in Greenland has dramatically increased. This phenomenon has reached its maximum expression in 2012 a...

SPRINT presentation was a 4 minutes presentation previous to poster exhibition. IGARSS 2019

Despite representing only the 1% of the total ocean’s water, the discharge by Arctic rivers accounts for about the 11% of the freshwater flow into the ocean. This huge volume of low density freshwater restricts the mixing between surface and deep ocean layers, because of the induced strong stratification. The accumulation of low salinity water on t...

Plain Language Summary El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) has far reaching climatic impacts over the globe so extending useful ENSO forecasts would be of great benefit for society. In response, NASA has developed satellite technology to observe the global hydrological cycle by measuring ocean sea surface salinity (SSS) from space. SSS, combined wi...

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...

After more than eight years of the European Space Agency (ESA) Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) acquisitions, an exhaustive, empirical characterization of the biases and uncertainties affecting SMOS brightness temperatures over the ocean is possible. We show that both parameters strongly depend not only on the position in the field of view,...

Soil moisture observations are expected to play an important role in monitoring global climate trends. However, measuring soil moisture is challenging because of its high spatial and temporal variability. Point-scale in-situ measurements are scarce and, excluding model-based estimates, remote sensing remains the only practical way to observe soil m...

Dimensional reduction methods are key to Earth system sciences. They allow dealing with extensive spatio-temporal climatic data sets in terms of individual variables as time series and spatial distributions. Principal Component Analysis (PCA), also called Empirical Orthogonal Functions (EOF) in geophysics, is a simple yet very powerful method to un...

This paper aims to present and assess the quality of seven years (2011–2017) of 25 km nine-day Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) Sea Surface Salinity (SSS) objectively analyzed maps in the Arctic and sub-Arctic oceans ( 50 ∘ N– 90 ∘ N). The SMOS SSS maps presented in this work are an improved version of the preliminary three-year dataset gene...

The Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) and Aquarius satellite missions have produced the first sea-surface salinity (SSS) maps from space. The quality of the retrieved SSS must be assessed, in terms of its validation against sparse ground truth, but also in terms of its ability to detect and characterize geophysical processes, such as mesoscal...

The triple collocation (TC) technique allows the simultaneous calibration of three independent, collocated data sources, while providing an estimate of their accuracy. In this paper, the TC is adapted to validate different salinity data products along the tropical band. The representativeness error (the true variance resolved by the relatively high...

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...

We use the concept of Energy Return On energy Invested (EROI) to calculate the amount of the available net energy that can be reasonably expected from World oil liquids during the next decades (till 2040). Our results indicate a decline in the available oil liquids net energy from 2015 to 2040. Such net energy evaluation is used as a starting point...

The Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission has provided a unique remote sensing capability for observing key variables of the hydrological cycle, such as the Sea Surface Salinity (SSS). However, due to some limitations related to the instrument interferometric concept and its challenging data processing, SMOS SSS maps still display signifi...

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...

In this work we focus on the Alboran Sea (western Mediterranean) to relate wind field and ocean velocity variability with chlorophyll a (Chl a) behaviour, using a 2-km resolution, coupled 3D ocean circulation-NPZD model (ROMS). The analysis is done in three steps. First, we split the seasonal and residual contribution for the fields under study. Se...

This article summarizes some of the activities in which Jordi Font, research professor and head of the Department of Physical and Technological Oceanography, Institut de Ciències del Mar (CSIC, Spanish National Research Council) in Barcelona, has been involved as co-Principal Investigator for Ocean Salinity of the European Space Agency Soil Moistur...

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...

Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) is the first satellite mission capable of measuring sea surface salinity and soil moisture from space. Its novel instrument (the L-band radiometer MIRAS) has required the development of new algorithms to process SMOS data, a challenging task due to many processing issues and the difficulties inherent in a new...

New ocean products from the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission are being developed at the Barcelona Expert Centre. Besides the already operational 9-day and monthly sea surface salinity (SSS) products, two additional daily SSS products have been recently become operational: a simple user-friendly product containing all swath-based Leve...

This work is devoted to describe the new processing techniques that are being conceived, developed and implemented at the Barcelona Expert Centre (BEC) for the generation of sea surface salinity (SSS) maps from the Soil Mooisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission. Several algorithms to mitigate the ripples and sidelobes present in the SMOS brightne...

Abrupt changes in the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) brightness temperatures, such as those produced by land/sea/ice transitions and Radio-Frequency Interference (RFI) sources, produce artificial rippling patterns (i.e. the so-called Gibbs-like contamination) that propagate through the SMOS-reconstructed image. A nodal sampling technique,...

The multifractal fusion is a non-parametric technique that merges remotely-sensed maps of different ocean variables to produce higher quality remote sensing products. This method was first introduced to reduce the noise level in a map of a given ocean variable provided that a higher-quality map of a second ocean variable is available. In this work,...

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...

Salinity and temperature gradients drive the thermohaline circulation of the oceans, and play a key role in the ocean-atmosphere coupling. The strong and direct interactions between the ocean and the cryosphere (primarily through sea ice and ice shelves) is also a key ingredient of the thermohaline circulation. The ESA's Soil Moisture and Ocean Sal...

This technical note presents a general comparison of the recently distributed L3 SMAP Salinity BETA product with ARGO profiles and objectively analyzed climatological sea surface salinity.

In this tecnical note we analyze two different approaches for salinity retrieval in SMOS: the standard Bayesian approach and a new not-Bayesian approach. In both cases systematic, a bias correction based on SMOS-based climatologies is applied. The performance of both approaches are analysed and discussed.

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...

Recent studies have shown significant sea surface salinity (SSS) changes at scales ranging from regional to global. In this study, we estimate global salinity means and trends using historical (1950–2014) SSS data from the UK Met. Office Hadley Centre objectively analyzed monthly fields and recent data from the SMOS satellite (2010–2014). We separa...

The main objective of the E-AIMS (Euro-Argo improvements for the GMES/Copernicus Marine Service) FP7 project is to conduct R&D activities on Argo float technology, Argo data centers and the design of the new phase of Argo (improved coverage, deep ocean, biogeochemical sensors, polar regions) to better answer existing and future needs of the Coperni...

New sea surface salinity (SSS) observations derived from satellite remote sensing platforms provide a comprehensive view of salt exchanges across boundary currents such as the Gulf Stream. The high resolution (45km spatial resolution and three-day repeat subcycle) of the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) observations allows detection (and tra...

This tecnical note describes two alternative algorithms for the SSS computation starting from SMOS brightness temperatures. We provide comparisons between DPGS L3 SSS maps and L3 SSS maps computed with these methods

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 study demonstrates the impact of gridded in situ and Aquarius sea surface salinity (SSS) on coupled forecasts for August 2011 until February 2014. Assimilation of all available subsurface temperature (ASSIM_Tz) is chosen as the baseline and an optimal interpolation of all in situ salinity (ASSIM_Tz_SSSIS) and Aquarius SSS (ASSIM_Tz_SSSAQ) are...

The tropical Pacific Ocean remained in a La Niña phase from mid 2010 to mid-2012. In this study, the 2010-2011 near-surface salinity signature of ENSO (El Niño-Southern Oscillation) is described and analyzed using a combination of numerical model output, in situ data and SMOS satellite salinity products. Comparisons of all salinity products show a...

The coming fossil fuel peak may cause shortages in energy supplies and major disturbances in the global economy. The forecasts for the future of our way of life are very divergent depending on the prediction used for future human access to energy, and they range between collapse and indefinite growth. The LINEX production function, which depends on...

Prediction of El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO), and its relation with global climate anomalies, continues to be an important research effort in short-term climate forecasting. This task has become even more challenging as researchers are becoming more and more convinced that there is not a single archetypical El Niño (or La Niña) pattern, but se...

More than three years have passed since the launch, on November 2, 2009, of the European Space Agency's (ESA) Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) satellite carrying a microwave synthetic aperture radiometer working at 1.4 GHz. The aim of the mission is to provide Sea Surface Salinity and Soil Moisture observations, with a spatial resolution of...

The goal of data assimilation (DA) is to combine, in the "best" possible way, all available sources of information of a given system to reconstruct its state. The appropriate weight given to observations and models is a function of their respective errors. In the specific case of oceanographic applications, one significant source of errors is discr...

The oceans not only cover about three quarters of the Earth’s surface but they also constitute the most relevant climate driver. However, our present knowledge about the oceans is by no means comparable to that of terrestrial or atmospheric systems. Salinity and temperature are key parameters to understand the dynamics of the oceans; but a global n...

This technical note focuses on the comparison of the various Level 3 binned products currently distributed by the CP34. The SMOS data used come from the 2012 reprocessing campaign, although the analysis here is restricted to the year 2011.

Capability for sea surface salinity observation was an important gap in ocean remote sensing in the last few decades of the 20th century. New technological developments during the 1990s at the European Space Agency led to the proposal of SMOS (Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity), an Earth explorer opportunity mission based on the use of a microwave i...

A preliminary attempt of deriving a purely satellite-based Temperature-Salinity (T-S) diagram is presented, with the overall aim of assessing to what extent is possible, and in which geographical areas, to identify and trace water masses by satellite. This has been performed by using recent SMOS and Aquarius satellite SSS products in conjunction wi...

In this study, the rain impact on the ASCAT operational Level 2 retrieved wind quality and the effectiveness of the quality control (QC) are investigated. It is shown that ASCAT is much less affected by direct rain effects, such as ocean splashing, but effects of increased wind variability appear to dominate. The operational QC proves to be effecti...

The quality of the Ku-band scatterometer-derived winds is known to be degraded by the presence of rain. Little work has been done in characterizing the impact of rain on C-band scatterometer winds, such as those from the Advanced Scatterometer (ASCAT) onboard Metop-A. In this paper, the rain impact on the ASCAT operational level 2 quality control (...

This work summarizes the activities carried out by the SMOS (Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity) Barcelona Expert Center (SMOS-BEC) team in conjunction with the CIALE/Universidad de Salamanca team, within the framework of the European Space Agency (ESA) CALIMAS project in preparation for the SMOS mission and during its first year of operation. Under...

The Microwave Imaging Radiometer using Aperture Synthesis (MIRAS) instrument onboard the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission was launched on November 2nd, 2009 with the aim of providing, over the oceans, synoptic sea surface salinity (SSS) measurements with spatial and temporal coverage adequate for large-scale oceanographic studies. F...

An Ensemble Kalman filter [Ballabrera-Poy et al., 2009] has been used to assimilate Sea Surface Temperature (SST) and Argo data into a regional configuration of the NEMO-OPA ocean model. Our validation of the data assimilation experiments include the comparison against a random ensemble of Argo profilers previously set aside (cross-validation), whe...

New techniques for analyzing the structure of remote sensing maps of ocean variables have been developed during recent years [Turiel et al., 2008, and references therein]. These techniques have been designed in the framework of the Multifractal Microcanonical Formalism (MMF), and are appropriate for dealing with scalars submitted to the action of a...

The study of fully developed turbulence has given rise to the development of new methods to describe real data of scalars submitted to the action of a turbulent flow. The application of this brand of methodologies (known as Microcanonical Multifractal Formalism, MMF) on remote sensing ocean maps open new ways to exploit those data for oceanographic...

The organisers of the Barcelona World Race (BWR), the Institute of Marine Sciences (ICM-CSIC) and the Maritime Catalan Forum (FMC) agreed on equiping the FMC boat, participating in the race, with a SeaBird MiniCTD. The idea was for the first time to explore how such oceanic races could help to monitor surface temperature and salinity all around the...

A detailed knowledge of local wind variability near the shore is very important since it strongly affects the weather and microclimate in coastal regions. Since coastal areas are densely populated and most activity at sea occurs near the shore, sea-surface wind field information is important for a number of applications. In the vicinity of land sea...

An Ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF) has been implemented in the non-linear and chaotic model of Lorenz (1963). A set of two data assimilation experiments are discussed here. In the first one, we follow the approach used by Evensen (1997) in which a fixed matrix Q (previously estimated by Evensen and Fario, 1997) is being added to the background ensemb...

This paper presents the soil moisture and ocean salinity maps from the SMOS mission generated operationally by the Spanish SMOS Level 3 and 4 data processing center (CP34) and experimentally by the SMOS Barcelona Expert Center (SMOS-BEC).

Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS), launched on 2 November 2009, is the first satellite mission addressing sea surface salinity (SSS) measurement from space. Its unique payload is the Microwave Imaging Radiometer using Aperture Synthesis (MIRAS), a new two-dimensional interferometer designed by the European Space Agency (ESA) and operating at...

A simple improvement to objective analysis of hydrographic data is proposed to eliminate spatial aliasing effects in tidally energetic regions. The proposed method consists of the evaluation of anomalies from observations with respect to circulation model fields. The procedure is run iteratively to achieve con-vergence. The method is applied in the...

The ESA/SMOS (European Space Agency/Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity) satellite mission has been successfully launched in November 2009. Since then, it has been possible, after systematic biases corrections, to deduce SMOS sea surface salinity (SSS) that reproduce quite well at large scale expected SSS spatial variations. In the open ocean and for...

The El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenomenon has a significant impact on climate variability throughout the world and so has been the key focus for improving coupled forecasts for the tropical Pacific. Assimilation of satellite products has shown a unique ability to improve short-term forecasts of the coupled system. However, owing to data sc...

SSS assimilation improves coupled forecastsDue to better specification of BLT and MLDSPCZ and western Pacific SSS most important

The equal-angle based grid is widely used for graphic representation and for geophysical data distribution. However, such a grid is composed by cells that do not preserve the area along the latitude. Indeed, the area of the cells in these grids decreases towards the poles, and this is one of the main causes why they are not used by SMOS processors....

The potentially significant role of the biogenic trace gas dimethylsulfide (DMS) in determining the Earth's radiation budget makes it necessary to accurately reproduce seawater DMS distribution and quantify its global flux across the sea/air interface. Following a threefold increase of data (from 15,000 to over 47,000) in the global surface ocean D...

The Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity mission (SMOS) from the European Space Agency (ESA), launched in November 2009, has initiated the era of satellite-based sea surface salinity observations. The Microwave Interferometric Radiometer with Aperture Synthesis (MIRAS) instrument has been designed to exploit the correlation between the measurements of...

Release of SMOS level 2 Ocean Salinity (OS) products to general users. Abstract: This note was first issued in June 2010 as additional information to the release of salinity products to the SMOS Calibration/Validation teams, under request from the SMOS Mission Manager (S. Mecklenburg) to the SMOS Co-Lead Investigator for Ocean Salinity (J. Font). I...

Preliminary results obtained during the commissioning phase of the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission are described, devoting special attention to the characterization of the systematic errors found in the measurements and the corresponding impact in the retrieved salinity product. The identified issues and objectives to consolidate an...

With the advent of ESA's SMOS Mission, we have the opportunity for the first time of measuring Sea Surface Salinity (SSS) from the space and at a synoptic scale. However, the MIRAS instrument onboard SMOS is a new concept of instrument, and the adjustment and calibration of this interferometric radiometer poses great challenges. In this paper, we s...

SMOS (Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity), launched in November 2, 2009 is the first satellite mission addressing the salinity measurement from space through the use of MIRAS (Microwave Imaging Radiometer with Aperture Synthesis), a new two-dimensional interferometer designed by the European Space Agency (ESA) and operating at L-band. This paper pres...

Since its launch on November 2, 2009, the Microwave Imaging Radiometer using Aperture Synthesis (MIRAS) onboard the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission is acquiring unprecedented measurements of Earth emissivity at L-band on a global scale. Over oceanic areas, an essential step in validating the inferred surface salinity is the systemat...