Jordi Solé

University of Barcelona | UB · Department of Earth and Ocean Dynamics

AR6 IPCC reports give divergent messages about the different socio-economic transition approaches to deal with the current climate emergency. The dangers of not giving a clear message to policymakers and to society on the need of changing the current socio-economic paradigm are considerable: to fall in the SSP3-7.0 scenario, which is conducive to t...

System Dynamics (SD) is a mathematical approach used to describe and simulate the dynamics of complex systems over time. The foundations of the methodology were laid in the 1950s by Professor Jay W. Forrester of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Forrester, 1971). The building blocks of SD models are stocks, flows, variables, parameters, an...

Energy-Economy-Environment (E3) models feature prominently in energy policy and climate mitigation planning. Nevertheless, these models have a mixed track record when assessed retrospectively and exhibit biases that can make them counterproductive for prescriptive policy during transition. We argue that in times of energy transitions it is preferab...

The need for alternative energy systems like offshore wind power to move towards the Green Deal objectives is undeniable. However, it is also increasingly clear that biodiversity loss and climate change are interconnected issues that must be tackled in unison. In this paper we highlight that offshore wind farms (OWF) in the Mediterranean Sea (MS) p...

The deep-sea red and blue shrimp Aristeus antennatus is a commercially valuable species that occurs in the northwestern Mediterranean Sea where ripe females have been found in fishing areas. In the Palamós harbor, a local management plan restricts fishing in certain locations to sustain the resource. However, little is known about the dispersal of...

In the present study, we compare energy transition scenarios from a new set of integrated assessment models, the suite of MEDEAS models, based on a systems dynamic modeling approach, with scenarios from two already well know structurally and conceptually different integrated assessment models, the Integrated MARKAL-EFOM System (TIMES) and the Long-...

Marine fronts are oceanographic drivers for marine species dispersal, especially for their pelagic organisms like the larvae. Larvae can aggregate at the front and consequently have a limited dispersal, which in turn reduces the connectivity between marine populations. Due to the high variations in the ocean, the fronts also have annual changes (i....

In the present study, we compare energy transition scenarios from a new set of Integrated Assessment Models, the suite of MEDEAS models, based on a systems dynamic modelling approach, with scenarios from two already well know structurally and conceptually different Integrated Assessment Models, the Integrated MARKAL-EFOM System (TIMES) and the Long...

The environmental module in WILIAM consists of: A land use module composed of the supply side is developed with databases from FAOSTAT and with the LPJml model for land use maps, crop yields and biomass potentials, the demand side based on FAOSTAT data on diet and food consumption and production. A land use allocation module including for Renewable...

Today's decision-makers rely heavily on Integrated Assessment Models to guide the decarbonisation of the energy system. Uncertainty is embedded in the assumptions these models are built upon. Unless those uncertainties are adequately assessed, using Integrated Assessment Models for policy design is unadvised. In this work we run Monte Carlo simulat...

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 deliverable describes the initial background and conceptual framework of the Land-use sub-module in the WILIAM (WIthin Limits Integrated Assessment Model) set of Integrated Assessment Models developed in the LOCOMOTION project.

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...

Submarine canyons aggregate numerous marine species and can affect the structure of benthic communities. However, analyses dedicated to assess the spatial distribution variability among several canyons are rare. In the northwestern Mediterranean Sea, three major submarine canyons consecutively indent the narrow margin. There, the abundance of deep-...

Information on the buoyancy of eggs and larvae from deep-sea species is rare but necessary for explaining the position of non-swimming larvae in the water column. Due to embryonic morphology and ecology diversities, egg buoyancy has important variations within one species and among other ones. Nevertheless, it has hardly been explored if this buoya...

Marine biophysical models can be used to explore the displacement of individuals in and between submarine canyons. Mostly, the studies focus on the shallow hydrodynamics in or around a single canyon. In the northwestern Mediterranean Sea, knowledge of the deep-sea circulation and its spatial variability in three contiguous submarine canyons is limi...

Discarding is one of the most important topics in fisheries management, both for economic and ecological reasons. The European Union has included, through the current EU Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) Regulation, a discard ban with a quite controversial instrument: to enforce the landing of unwanted catch as a measure to promote their reduction. Thi...

Information on the buoyancy of eggs and larvae from deep-sea species is rare but necessary for explaining the position of non-swimming larvae in the water column. Due to embryonic morphology and ecology diversities, egg buoyancy has important variations within one species and among other ones. Nevertheless, it has hardly been explored if this buoya...

Marine biophysical models can be used to explore the displacement of individuals in and between submarine canyons. Mostly, the studies focus on the shallow hydrodynamics in or around a single canyon. In the northwestern Mediterranean Sea, the knowledge on the deep-sea circulation and its spatial variability in three contiguous submarine canyons is...

The spatial prediction of species distributions from survey data is a significant component of spatial planning and the ecosystem-based management approach to marine resources. Statistical analysis of species occurrences and their relationships with associated environmental factors is used to predict how likely a species is to occur in unsampled lo...

The Global Carbon Budget is the cumulative carbon emissions that human activities can generate while limiting the global temperature increase to less than 2°C. On this basis, most countries ratified the Paris Agreement 2015, pledging to reduce national emissions and the impacts of climate change. The European Union has planned to reduce emissions b...

The Paris Agreement, ratified in 2015, pledged to reduce greenhouse gas emissions within a Global Carbon Budget that limits the global temperature increase to less than 2 °C. With the Roadmap 2050 mitigation measures, the European Union has a target to reduce emissions by 80% of their 1990 value by 2050 but without giving an estimation or a maximum...

The Global Carbon Budget is the cumulative carbon emissions that human activities can generate while limiting the global temperature increase to less than 2°C. On this basis, most countries ratified the Paris Agreement 2015, pledging to reduce national emissions and the impacts of climate change. The European Union has planned to reduce emissions b...

A 100% renewable economy would give a lasting solution to the challenges raised by climate change, energy security, sustainability, and pollution. The conversion of the present transport system appears to be one of the most difficult aspects of such renewable transition. This study reviews the technologies and systems that are being proposed or pro...

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...

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...

Plankton ecology has been the object of intense research and progress in the last few decades. This has been partly due to technological advances that have facilitated the multidisciplinary and high-resolution sampling of ecosystems and improved experimentation and analytical methodologies, and to sophisticated modelling. In addition, exceptional r...

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...

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...

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...

To realistically predict spatial-temporal dynamics of species in marine ecosystems it is essential to consider environmental conditions in conjunction with human activities and food web dynamics. In this study, we used Ecospace, the spatial-temporal dynamic module of Ecopath with Ecosim (EwE) food web model, to drive a spatially explicit marine foo...

To realistically predict spatial-temporal dynamics of species in marine ecosystems it is essential to consider environmental conditions in conjunction with human activities and food web dynamics. In this study, we used Ecospace, the spatial-temporal dynamic module of Ecopath with Ecosim (EwE) food web model, to drive a spatially explicit marine foo...

The peak of fossil fuels is probably a matter of decades rather than centuries. Setting-up a new energy mix, initially based on renewable primary energy and electrification of the economy, seems unavoidable and it may start a last expansive cycle, but it also will deplete an important fraction of reserves of several crucial minerals. Soon after it,...

A conceptual model of the physical behavior of a shallow (6 m deep) micro-tidal estuary (Alfacs Bay) is proposed, based on the interpretation of a field data set, and subsequently tested against the results of three-dimensional hydrodynamic simulations. At seasonal timescales, the buoyancy associated with freshwater inflows dominates the tidal forc...

We explore the underlying mechanisms of the early life history dynamics of the European anchovy, Engraulis encrasicolus, in the SW Mediterranean. By using a 3D ROMS hydrodynamic model coupled to an individual-based model (IBM) of the larval stages of the European anchovy, we tested the following hypotheses: (1) the plausible effective spawning zone...

This work proposes a new method to reconstruct and forecast surface Chlorophyll (Chl) from remotely sensed (SeaWiFS) data in the Alboran Sea, based on the correlation between zonal wind velocities and satellite Chl concentrations. First, the spatial and temporal variability of Chl and zonal wind have been characterized using standard statistics. Se...

Alfacs and Fangar (North East of the Iberian Peninsula) are two embayments of the Ebre Delta complex with typical Mediterranean characteristics. Both are subject to the same meteorological forcing and receive similar freshwater inputs from irrigation drainage channels. However the basin volume in Alfacs is about ten times larger than in Fangar. We...

The effect of Dissolved Organic Phosphorus (DOP) availability and nutrient limitation of phytoplankton growth in an estuarine bay (Alfacs Bay, NW Mediterranean) have been studied by means of a zero-dimensional ecological model including nitrogen, phosphorus (organic and inorganic), two groups of phytoplankton (diatoms and flagellates), one group of...

The role of resting cysts on the development of Alexandrium minutum blooms in a typical Mediterranean semi-enclosed water body (Arenys de Mar Harbor, NW Mediterranean) was studied by means of matrix and dynamic population models. We used a series of scenarios, constrained when possible by experimentally measured parameters to test whether excystmen...

This report presents the scientific, technical and logistic information as well as preliminary results related to the SINOCOP experiment carried out in the Balearic Sea in May 2009 in the frame of SINOCOP and MyOcean FP7 projects, as part of WP 9, 11 and 15.

Time series of meteorological and hydrographic variables were analyzed using Huang's Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD) to ascertain the relationships among climatic forcings and the hydrographic behavior in an estuarine bay. The EMD method allowed us to separate the different characteristic oscillation patterns (or modes) of a 14 year-long time se...

a b s t r a c t Time series of meteorological and hydrographic variables were analyzed using Huang's Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD) to ascertain the relationships among climatic forcings and the hydrographic behavior in an estuarine bay. The EMD method allowed us to separate the different characteristic oscillation patterns (or modes) of a 14 y...

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...

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 work we have performed a detailed analysis, using signal processing tools, to study time series of data (temperature proxy) extracted from the GRIP ice-core records and we relate it with the evolution of atmospheric CO 2 within the last glacial period. Our method is based in considering the warm periods known as Dansgaard–Oeschger (D/O) eve...

Determination of the timing and duration of paleoclimatic events is a challenging task. Classical techniques for time-series analysis rely too strongly on having a constant sampling rate, which poorly adapts to the uneven time recording of paleoclimatic variables; new, more flexible methods issued from Non-Linear Physics are hence required. In this...

Determination of the timing and duration of pa-leoclimatic events is a challenging task. Classical tech-niques for time-series analysis rely too strongly on having a constant sampling rate, which poorly adapts to the uneven time recording of paleoclimatic variables; new, more flexible methods issued from Non-Linear Physics are hence required. In th...

A clustering methodology is applied to investigate the thermohaline structure of Levantine Intermediate Water (LIW) in the western Mediterranean basin. Sixteen free-drifting hydrographic profilers were deployed in the framework of the MFSTEP project (MEDARGO component) from September 2003. A total of 925 CTD profiles collected up to the beginning o...

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...

A clustering methodology is applied to investigate the thermohaline structure of Levantine Intermediate Water (LIW) in the western Mediterranean basin. 16 free-drifting hydrographic profilers were deployed in the framework of the MFSTEP project (MedArgo component) from September 2003. A total of 925 CTD profiles data collected until the beginning o...

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...

The objective of the ESA airborne EuroSTARRS campaign was to provide data for the scientific studies supporting the SMOS mission. In particular, to acquire "SMOS like" data to advance the knowledge of the passive microwave multiincidence observations at L-band for various surface types. The retrieved variables could be validated bya large amount of...