(NP / 29-06-10)  Scientists of Oceanographic centres in Málaga, Baleares and Gijón of the Instituto Español de Oceanografía (IEO), in collaboration with scientists of Instituto de Ciencias del Mar (ICM) from Barcelona of the CSIC have showed that western waters of the Mediterranean have been getting warm progressively from mid 70’s to nowadays, at an average of one thousandth every each year.

In this work, published in May in Journal of Marine Systems, the series of temperature and salinity longer analyzed up to now in the Mediterranean have been reconstructed, from 1900 to 2008. Besides, it has been observed that the way the temperature increases in the deepest layers of this area is related to air temperature in the North Hemisphere and the heat absorbed by the Atlantic Ocean.

This way, the western Mediterranean is an excellent indicator of the changes taking place in the terrestrial climate at a high scale, and so the observation systems developed by IEO and ICM have become very useful tools to study the climate change.

To carry out this study they have been used data of the current project to monitor the western Mediterranean by the IEO, named RADMED, of previous projects such as Ecomálaga, Ecomurcia and Cirbal, and historical series of the station of l’Estartit.

More info about Project RADMED, observation systems of the IEO and the oceanographic station of l’Estartit, operated by ICM (CSIC) can be read in the web site of the Grupo Mediterráneo de Cambio Climático del IEO (www.ma.ieo.es/gcc).