The recent addition of a ship-based component within MonGOOS is of strategic importance, as such a sustainable program for regularly repeated coast-to-coast zonal and meridional full-depth cruises to collect Essential Ocean Variables (EOVs) was missing in its portfolio. The Mediterranean ship-based hydrography program(Med-SHIP) builds on the international program GO-SHIP. Med-SHIP addresses a crucial component of the Mediterranean Ocean Observing System, i.e. the Repeat Hydrography, to promote systematic and high-quality measurements of a broad list of physical, chemical and biological EOVs, in order to to document the budget of heat, freshwater, carbon, oxygen, inorganic and organic nutrients and transient tracers. Med-SHIP cruises were implemented thanks to ship access provided by individual countries or by the Transnation Access of the Eurofleets RI. The sampling scheme covering different Mediterranean sub-basins, from east to west (2001, 2011 and 2018) and from north to south (2016 and 2022) follows the initial Repeat Hydrography plan in Schroeder et al. (2015).
Proposed repeat Med-SHIP hydrographic sections. Red dots indicate the low-frequency zonal section, yellow dots the high-frequency meridional sections. The interior salinity along the zonal section is shown in color. From https://doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2015.71
Station map of the Med-SHIP repeated cruises (N-S and W-E) carried out between 2011 and 2022. From Schroeder et al, submitted.
Leaving aside weather conditions, a robust cruise plan in the Mediterranean Sea requires guaranteed access to Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs), which is a diplomatic cumbersome process in the region, especially in the Eastern Basin and along the southern shores. The Med-SHIP program aims to be a sustained and internationally underpinned network with two additional objectives: i) to provide sustained support to the monitoring efforts of European and MENA countries by providing capacity-building training on target topics such as ocean acidification, and ii) to raise public and stakeholder awareness of the importance of Med-SHIP for detecting and predicting global change risks affecting Mediterranean marine ecosystems.
