| ABSTRACT | Different hydrographic gridded products are available for the Mediterranean Sea. These products provide monthly temperature and salinity fields on regular grids that cover the whole basin from the sea surface to the bottom and span from 1950 to present. These features make these products very appealing and have been extensively used in the Mediterranean for a wide range of applications, from process-oriented studies to climate analysis. However, it is important to bear in mind that those products are generated from sparse in-situ observations characterized by a rather irregular coverage in space and time, so that there are significant uncertainties associated to them. Also, ocean regional models (ORCM) have also experienced a great progress during the last years. State-of-the-art ORCMs are able to capture the main features of the circulation, salt and heat content evolution and to reproduce extreme events as dense water formation or the EMT. However, there are also discrepancies among the models and there is a general agreement that there is room for improvements.
In this presentation we will review and quantify some of the uncertainties associated to observational and climate products and discuss some ideas about how to deal with uncertain products in climate studies. |