Meric A. Srokosz

• Doctor of Philosophy
• National Oceanography Centre, Southampton

Regional effects of marine cold spells (MCS, periods of anomalous cooling), their impact on ecosystem biogeochemistry, and link to salinity extremes remain underexplored. A case in point is North Atlantic's Cold Anomaly (CA) region (known as the “cold blob”), which hits record low temperatures during 2014–16 while most of the global ocean warmed. U...

The North Atlantic subpolar gyre (SPG) is a key region for the North Atlantic bloom (NAB), the phytoplankton foundation of the regional food web. The NAB depends on nutrients seasonally introduced into the surface ocean by deep winter convection. Under climate change, this pattern is threatened by increasing water column stratification, representin...

Up to now, the UK has avoided major marine heatwaves (MHWs) that cause severe damage to marine ecosystems and the blue economy. However, an unprecedented in its intensity, though short-lived, MHW occurred in UK waters in June 2023. This event sounded an alarm bell, highlighting gaps in our understanding of MHW characteristics and their potential fu...

Rising surface temperatures are projected to cause more frequent and intense droughts in the world's drylands. This can lead to land degradation, mobilization of soil particles, and an increase in dust aerosol emissions from arid and semi-arid regions. Dust aerosols are a key source of bio-essential nutrients, can be transported in the atmosphere o...

The North Atlantic subpolar gyre is a key region for the North Atlantic phytoplankton bloom (NAB), the foundation of the regional foodweb. The NAB is dependent on nutrients seasonally introduced into the surface ocean by deep winter convection. Under climate change, this pattern is threatened by increasing water column stratification, and the NAB m...

The North Atlantic subpolar gyre is a key region for the North Atlantic phytoplankton bloom (NAB), the foundation of the regional foodweb. The NAB is dependent on nutrients seasonally introduced into the surface ocean by deep winter convection. Under climate change, this pattern is threatened by increasing water column stratification, and the NAB m...

Somali upwelling is the fifth largest upwelling globally with high productivity, attracting tuna migratory species. A key control on the upwelling productivity is its interaction with one of the world’s largest oceanic eddies, the Great Whirl inducing a strong downwelling signal. Here, we use satellite-derived observations to determine the Great Wh...

This paper provides an introduction to the special issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London of papers from the 2022 Royal Society meeting on ‘Atlantic overturning: new observations and challenges'. It provides the background and rationale for the meeting, briefly summarizes prior progress on observing the Atlantic over...

Coastal upwelling is an oceanographic process that brings cold, nutrient-rich waters to the ocean surface from depth. These nutrient-rich waters help drive primary productivity which forms the foundation of ecological systems and the fisheries dependent on them. Although coastal upwelling systems of the Western Indian Ocean (WIO) are seasonal (i.e....

Retention is thought to be a crucial component required to create a favourable habitat for coastal pelagic species. It is vital for the survival of ‘chokka’ squid (Loligo reynaudii), which is a fishery that supports thousands of people living in the Eastern Cape of South Africa. After chokka spawn, retention on the Agulhas Bank is crucial to preven...

The combined application of machine learning and satellite observations offers a new way for analysing complex ocean biological and physical processes. Here, an unsupervised machine learning approach, Self Organizing Maps (SOM), is applied to discover links between surface current variability and phytoplankton productivity during seasonal upwelling...

The Agulhas Bank, an area of broad continental shelf extending 250 km offshore of South Africa, sustains rich and productive fisheries. However, its primary production is driven by a complex mosaic of biophysical mechanisms, highly variable in time and space. The key drivers include a system of multiple costal upwellings, complex shelf currents and...

Using satellite observations, this study uncovers the biophysical drivers of the lucrative chokka squid fishery in South Africa over the last two decades (1998–2017) and addresses their potential links with low squid catches. Chokka squid fishing is crucial to the economic wellbeing of local communities. However, the squid biomass is prone to consi...

The fast development of the offshore energy industry becomes an essential component of resilient economies in most of the countries around the North Sea, addressing an increasing demand for cost-efficient and environmentally safe energy sources. Offshore wind farms are planned to be installed further away from the coasts to ensure stronger and more...

Global Navigation Satellite System Reflectometry (GNSS-R) is a rapidly developing Earth observation technology that makes use of signals of opportunity from Global Navigation Satellite Systems that have been reflected off the Earth’s surface. The Cyclone Global Navigation Satellite System (CyGNSS) is a constellation of eight small satellites launch...

In 2018 we celebrated 25 years of development of radar altimetry, and the progress achieved by this methodology in the fields of global and coastal oceanography, hydrology, geodesy and cryospheric sciences. Many symbolic major events have celebrated these developments, e.g., in Venice, Italy, the 15th (2006) and 20th (2012) years of progress and mo...

In 2018 we celebrated 25 years of development of radar altimetry, and the progress achieved by this methodology in the fields of global and coastal oceanography, hydrology, geodesy and cryospheric sciences. Many symbolic major events have celebrated these developments, e.g., in Venice, Italy, the 15th (2006) and 20th (2012) years of progress and mo...

For the countries bordering the tropical Western Indian Ocean (TWIO), living marine resources are vital for food security. However, this region has largely escaped the attention of studies investigating potential impacts of future climate change on the marine environment. Understanding how marine ecosystems in coastal East Africa may respond to var...

Advances in satellite remote sensing of environmental perturbations have become important in understanding variations of ocean productivity and small pelagic fish catches. This marine resource is vital for coastal populations dependent on artisanal fishing for their income and food security, such as in coastal East Africa. In this region, the easte...

Under the impact of natural and anthropogenic climate variability, upwelling systems are known to change their properties leading to associated regime shifts in marine ecosystems. These often impact commercial fisheries and societies dependent on them. In a region where in situ hydrographic and biological marine data are scarce, this study uses a c...

The UK’s TechDemoSat-1 (TDS-1), launched 2014, has demonstrated the use of global positioning system (GPS) signals for monitoring ocean winds and sea ice. Here it is shown, for the first time, that Galileo and BeiDou signals detected by TDS-1 show similar promise. TDS-1 made seven raw data collections, recovering returns from Galileo and BeiDou, be...

Small pelagic fisheries provide food security, livelihood support and economic stability for East African coastal communities—a region of least developed countries. Using remotely- sensed and field observations together with modelling, we address the biophysical drivers of this important resource. We show that annual variations of fisheries yield p...

Improved digital elevation models (DEMs) of the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets are presented, which have been derived from Global Navigation Satellite Systems-Reflectometry (GNSS-R). This builds on a previous study (Cartwright et al., 2018) using GNSS-R to derive an Antarctic DEM but uses improved processing and an additional 13 months of measu...

Infragravity waves are generated along coasts, and some small fraction of their energy escapes to the open oceans and propagates with little attenuation. Due to the scarcity of deep‐ocean observations of these waves, the mechanism and the extent of the infragravity waves energy leakage from the coasts remains poorly understood. Understanding the ge...

This paper presents the temporal evolution of Global Navigation Satellite System Reflectometry (GNSS-R) ocean wind speed retrieval performance during three years of the UK TechDemoSat-1 (TDS-1) mission. TDS-1 was launched in July 2014 and provides globally distributed spaceborne GNSS-R data over a lifespan of over three years, including several mon...

The North Kenya Banks (NKBs) have recently emerged as a new frontier for food security and could become an economically important fishery for Kenya with improved resources providing better accessibility. Little research has been done on the mechanisms supporting high fish productivity over the NKBs with information on annual and interannual environ...

Abstract. Improved Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) of the Antarctic and Greenland Ice Sheets are presented, derived from Global Navigation Satellite Systems-Reflectometry (GNSS-R). This builds on a previous study (Cartwright et al., 2018) using GNSS-R to derive an Antarctic DEM but uses improved processing and an additional 13 months of measurement...

A new method for the detection of sea ice using GNSS‐R (Global Navigation Satellite Systems Reflectometry) is presented and applied to 33 months of data from the U.K. TechDemoSat‐1 mission. This method of sea ice detection shows the potential for a future GNSS‐R polar mission, attaining an agreement of over 98% and 96% in the Antarctic and Arctic,...

The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) extends from the Southern Ocean to the northern North Atlantic, transporting heat northwards throughout the South and North Atlantic, and sinking carbon and nutrients into the deep ocean. Climate models indicate that changes to the AMOC both herald and drive climate shifts. Intensive trans-basi...

Studies of changes in wave climate typically consider trends in sea state statistics, such as the significant wave height. However, the temporal variability of individual rogue waves, which pose a hazard to users of the sea and coastal environment has not been investigated. We use time series of continuous surface elevation over 124–270 months (spa...

Rogue waves are ocean surface waves larger than the surrounding sea that can pose a danger to ships and offshore structures. They are often deemed unpredictable without complex measurement of the wave field and computationally intensive calculation which is infeasible in most applications, consequently there a need for fast predictors. Here we col...

The first digital elevation model (DEM) of the Antarctic ice sheet derived from Global Navigation Satellite Systems‐Reflectometry (GNSS‐R) data from the UK TechDemoSat‐1 satellite is presented. This is obtained using 32 months of data from the mission. This opportunistic and inexpensive method is shown to produce encouraging results from the techno...

Most estimates of the climatically-important transfer of atmospheric gases into, and out of, the ocean assume that the ocean surface is unbroken by breaking waves. However the trapping of bubbles of atmospheric gases in the ocean by breaking waves introduces an asymmetry in this flux. This asymmetry occurs as a bias towards injecting gas into the o...

Offshore structures experience several kinds of sea hazards. Over most of the world ocean high waves or strong currents are the concern. In high latitudes sea ice poses an additional hazard. Loads on offshore structures from waves and current can be calculated using the well-known Morison equation. We have modified the equation to calculate the loa...

Although ocean salinity is a key parameter for determining the ocean circulation on local and global scales, measuring salinity from space has only been possible since the launch of the European Space Agency's Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission in November 2009. This is in contrast to the other key oceanographic parameter, temperature,...

This article reviews recent scientific progress, relating to four major systems that could exhibit threshold behaviour: ice sheets, the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC), tropical forests and ecosystem responses to ocean acidification. The focus is on advances since the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fifth Assessment Rep...

Offshore structures experience several kinds of sea hazards. Over most of the world ocean high waves or strong currents are the concern. In high latitudes sea ice poses an additional hazard. Loads on offshore structures from waves and current can be calculated using the well-known Morison equation. We have modified the equation to calculate the loa...

This article reviews recent scientific progress, relating to four major systems that could exhibit threshold behaviour: ice sheets, the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC), tropical forests and ecosystem responses to ocean acidification. The focus is on advances since the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fifth Assessment Rep...

We present the first examples of GNSS-Reflectometry observations of hurricanes using spaceborne data from the UK TechDemoSat-1 (TDS-1) mission. We confirm that GNSS-R signals can detect ocean condition changes in very high near-surface ocean wind associated with hurricanes. TDS-1 GNSS-R reflections were collocated with IBTrACS hurricane data, MetOp...

Using array analysis, the direction and distance to a seismic P-wave source can be determined. However, individual arrays are limited in their geographical coverage and by their resolving capability, which is determined by the array aperture, configuration and number of stations. We demonstrate these limitations on three large seismic arrays locate...

Most estimates of the climatically-important transfer of atmospheric gases into, and out of, the ocean assume that the ocean surface is unbroken by breaking waves. However the trapping of bubbles of atmospheric gases in the ocean by breaking waves introduces an asymmetry in this flux. This asymmetry occurs as a bias towards injecting gas into the o...

Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) are established to conserve important ecosystems and protect marine species threatened in the wider ocean. However, even MPAs in remote areas are not wholly isolated from anthropogenic impacts. "Upstream" activities, possibly thousands of kilometers away, can influence MPAs through ocean currents that determine their c...

Oceanic microseisms are generated by the interaction of opposing ocean waves and subsequent coupling with the seabed, so microseisms should contain information on the ocean conditions that generated them. This leads to the possibility of using seismic records as a proxy for the ocean gravity wavefield. Here we investigate the P-wave component of mi...

This document represents the final report of a study funded by EUMETSAT about SAR mode Sea State Bias (SSB) for the Sentinel-6/Jason-CS mission. The study comprises a critical review of SSB estimation methods in conventional (low-resolution mode or LRM) altimetry, theoretical considerations about the effect of swell on SAR altimeter waveforms and e...

The supply of nitrate to surface waters plays a crucial role in maintaining marine life. Physical processes at the mesoscale (~10-100?km) and smaller have been advocated to provide a major fraction of the global supply. Whilst observational studies have focussed on well-defined features, such as isolated eddies, the vertical circulation and nutrien...

The complex patterns observed in marine phytoplankton distributions arise from the interplay of biological and physical processes, but the nature of the balance remains uncertain centuries after the first observations. Previous observations have shown a consistent trend of decreasing variability with decreasing length-scale. Influenced by similar s...

Iron limitation of primary productivity prevails across much of the Southern Ocean but there are exceptions; in particular, the phytoplankton blooms associated with the Kerguelen Plateau, Crozet Islands, and South Georgia. These blooms occur annually, fertilized by iron and nutrient-rich shelf waters that are transported downstream from the islands...

The European Space Agency (ESA) Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) satellite has been providing data, including sea surface salinity (SSS) measurements, for more than five years. However, the operational ESA Level 2 SSS data are known to have significant spatially and temporally varying biases between measurements from ascending passes (SSSA)...

Taking advantage of the spatially dense, multi-year time series of global Sea Surface Salinity (SSS) from two concurrent satellite missions, the spatial and temporal decorrelation scales of SSS in the Tropical Atlantic 30°N–30°S are quantified for the first time from SMOS and Aquarius observations. Given the dominance of the seasonal cycle in SSS v...

Rapidly retreating sea ice is expected to influence future phytoplankton production in the Arctic Ocean by perturbing nutrient and light fields, but poor understanding of present phytoplankton distributions and governing mechanisms make projected changes highly uncertain. Here we use a simulation that reproduces observed seasonal phytoplankton chlo...

Infragravity waves are oceanic surface gravity waves but with wavelengths (10's km) and periods (>30s) much longer than wind waves and swell. Mostly studied in shallow water, knowledge of infragravity waves in deep water has remained limited. Recent interest in deep-water infragravity waves has been motivated by the error they may contribute to fut...

Numerous observations demonstrate that considerable spatial variability exists in components of the marine planktonic ecosystem at the mesoscale and submesoscale (100 km -1 km). The causes and consequences of physical processes at these scales (‘eddy advection’) influencing biogeochemistry have received much attention. Less studied, the non-linear...

In the oligotrophic waters to the east of Madagascar, a large phytoplankton bloom is found to occur in late austral summer. This bloom is composed of nitrogen fixers and can cover up to ∼1% of the world's ocean surface area. Satellite observations show that its spatial structure is closely tied to the underlying mesoscale eddy field in the region....

The importance of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) heat transport for climate is well acknowledged. Climate models predict that the AMOC will slow down under global warming, with substantial impacts, but measurements of ocean circulation have been inadequate to evaluate these predictions. Observations over the past decade have...

An outstanding problem in biogeochemical modelling of the ocean is that many of the key processes occur intermittently at small scales, such as the sub-mesoscale, that are not well represented in global ocean models. This is partly due to their failure to resolve sub-mesoscale phenomena, which play a significant role in vertical nutrient supply. Si...

An outstanding problem in biogeochemical modelling of the ocean is that many of the key processes occur intermittently at small scales, such as the sub-mesoscale, that are not well represented in global ocean models. This is partly due to their failure to resolve sub-mesoscale phenomena, which play a significant role in vertical nutrient supply. Si...

Artificial ocean iron fertilization (OIF) enhances phytoplankton productivity and is being explored as a means of sequestering anthropogenic carbon within the deep ocean. To be considered successful, carbon should be exported from the surface ocean and isolated from the atmosphere for an extended period (e.g. the IPCCÕs standard 100-year time-horiz...

This report summarises the key new literature on the main large-scale systems that may feature abrupt and/or irreversible changes (specifically, ice sheets, Arctic sea ice, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), tropical forests, carbon stored in terrestrial permafrost or below the ocean in permafrost or as methane hydrates, or the...

Observations from the SMOS satellite are used to reveal new aspects of Tropical Atlantic sea surface salinity (SSS) variability. Over an annual cycle, the variability is dominated by eastern and western basin SSS "poles," with seasonal ranges up to 6.5 pss (practical salinity scale), that vary out of phase by 6 months and largely compensate each ot...

The launch of the European Space Agency (ESA) Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) satellite in November 2009 marked a new era in satellite oceanography. SMOS was joined in orbit, in June 2011, by the NASA/Argentine Aquarius/SAC-D mission, specifically designed to measure sea surface salinity (SSS). These two satellites have significantly improv...

The late austral summer (February-April) phytoplankton bloom that occurs east of Madagascar exhibits significant interannual variability and at its largest extent covers ~1% of the world's ocean surface area. The bloom raises many intriguing questions about how it begins, is sustained, propagates to the east, exports carbon, and ends. It has been o...

[1] Ocean models require subgrid-scale parametrizations of vertical mixing expressed in terms of a quantity that is easily diagnosable from model output, such as the Richardson number. To date parametrizing mixing for low (<1) Richardson number flows, such as the Equatorial Undercurrent, has received the most attention. Here a new Richardson number...

The key conclusions from the above are as follows: the importance of the AMOC for the climate is paramount; there is a pressing need for sustained observations of the AMOC and associated heat transport; and the potential predictability of the AMOC and therefore of its climate impacts needs further study. The second conclusion, unsurprisingly, agree...

Research into the use of unstructured mesh methods for ocean modelling has been growing steadily in the last few years. One advantage of using unstructured meshes is that one can concentrate resolution where it is needed. In addition, dynamic adaptive mesh optimisation (DAMO) strategies allow resolution to be concentrated when this is required. Des...

As part of a multidisciplinary cruise to the Iceland Basin in July–August 2007, near to the historical JGOFS Ocean Weather Station India site (∼∼59° N, ∼∼19° W), observations were made of vertical turbulent nutrient fluxes around an eddy dipole, a strong mesoscale feature consisting of a cyclonic eddy and an anti-cyclonically rotating mode-water ed...

This paper provides an assessment of synoptic measurements of sea surface salinity (SSS) from the European Space Agency Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) satellite. Due to the complex nature of the response of L-band signals to SSS, SMOS provides three values of SSS at each grid point from three different forward models. To meet oceanographic...

Salinity variations in recent decades have been linked to the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (MOC) strength, and the tropics/subtropics are considered important regions in relation to the reversal of northern N. Atlantic freshening and MOC recovery. This study focuses on the controlling mechanisms, particularly the influence of freshwa...

Global Navigation Satellite System-Reflectometry (GNSS-R), is an established technique that exploits GNSS signals of opportunity reflected from the surface of the ocean, to look primarily at the ocean surface roughness. The strength of this technique, and the primary motivation to carry it forward, is in the fact that GNSS signals are available glo...

We present the implementation of a facet-based simulator to investigate the forward scattering of L-band signals from realistic sea surfaces and its application to spaceborne ocean Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) Reflectometry. This approach provides a new flexible tool to assess the influence of the ocean surface roughness on scattered G...

We use a backprojection method to determine dominant directions of ocean infragravity waves from 60-200 s period from cross correlations between 5 ocean bottom differential pressure gauges located off the coast of Sumatra. We observe infragravity waves arriving from all directions, but there is a dominant source direction that represents coherent p...

Rapid, or abrupt, climate change is regarded as a change in the climate system to a new state following the crossing of a threshold. It generally occurs at a rate exceeding that of the change in the underlying cause. Episodes of rapid climate change abound in the recent geological past (defined here as the interval between the last glacial maximum,...

Primary production in the world ocean is significantly controlled by meso- and sub-mesocale process. Thus existing general circulation models applied at the basin and global scale are limited by two opposing requirements: to have high enough spatial resolution to resolve fully the processes involved (down to order 1km) and the need to realistically...

This article reviews some of the major lines of recent scientific progress relevant to the choice of global climate policy targets, focusing on changes in understanding since publication of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report (IPCC AR4). Developments are highlighted in the following major climate system components...

Air-sea open ocean CO2 flux measurements have been made using the Eddy Covariance (EC) technique onboard the weathership Polarfront in the North Atlantic between September 2006 and December 2009. Flux measurements were made using an autonomous system ‘AutoFlux’. CO2 mass density was measured with an open-path infrared gas analyzer. Following qualit...

Ocean oligotrophic gyres are characterised by low rates of primary production. Nevertheless their great area, covering roughly a third of the Earth's surface, and probably constituting the largest ecosystem on the planet means that they play a crucial role in global biogeochemistry. Current models give values of primary production two orders of mag...

Geophysical Research Letters (GRL) is the American Geophysical Union's premier journal of fast, groundbreaking communication. It rapidly publishes high-impact, letter-length articles, and it is the top-cited multidisciplinary geosciences journal over the past 10 years, with an impact factor that increased again in 2009, to 3.204. For manuscripts su...

Waves and wave breaking play a significant role in the air-sea exchanges of momentum, sea spray aerosols, and trace gases such as CO2, but few direct measurements of wave breaking have been obtained in the open ocean (far from the coast). This paper describes the development and initial deployments on two research cruises of an autonomous spar buoy...

Initial results from a deployment of the SUV-6 ultraviolet spectrophotometer, integrated with the SeaSoar towed vehicle, are presented. The innovative, combined system measures nitrate concentration at high spatial resolution (4 m vertically, 5 km horizontally), high sensitivity (0.2 μM), and concomitantly with temperature, salinity, and dissolved...

We present a study on the emergence of spatial structure in plankton dynamics under the influence of stirring and mixing. A distribution of plankton is represented as a lattice of nonidentical, interacting, oscillatory plankton populations. Each population evolves according to (i) the internal biological dynamics represented by an NPZ model with po...

We report on studies of sea surface salinity (SSS) in the Atlantic in relation to the calibration and validation of the European Space Agency Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) satellite launched in November 2009. First order validation of SMOS SSS focus on large SSS signatures such as the meridional gradient of SSS, the maximum SSS in the Atl...