BrainMap

Mrs. Mariana Bernardino

Dr

Researcher - Centre for Marine Technology and Ocean Engineering - CENTEC, University of Lisbon

Researcher | Teaching staff | Scientific reviewer | Consultant

Web of Science ResearcherID: not public

Expertise & keywords

CLimate change Impacts on the Marine Environment of the North Atlantic. Call name:
PTDC/AAG-MAA/5070/2014 2018 - 2021

Role in this project: Project coordinator

Coordinating institution: Centre for Marine Technology and Ocean Engineering , Instituto Superior Tecnico, Universidade de Lisboa

Project partners: Centre for Marine Technology and Ocean Engineering , Instituto Superior Tecnico, Universidade de Lisboa (); Portuguese Institute for the Sea and the Atmosphere ()

Affiliation: Centre for Marine Technology and Ocean Engineering , Instituto Superior Tecnico, Universidade de Lisboa ()

Project website: http://www.centec.tecnico.ulisboa.pt/centec/projects.aspx?projectid=165

Abstract:

An improved understanding of the present and future marine climatology is necessary for numerous marine and coastal activities, such as offshore industries, de assessment of flooding risk, the design of marine structures and the evaluation of wave energy resources.

The main objective of MARCLIM is to study the present and the future marine climates off the Atlantic coasts of the Iberian Peninsula, with a special focus on the coasts of Portugal main land making use of ensemble simulations.

This project is a follow up of the CLIBECO research project (EXPL/AAG-MAA/1001/2013) and aims both to complete the work started in CLIBECO and to give a national contribution to the COWCLIP effort. COWCLIP is an international collaboration working group endorsed by the World Climate Research Program and Joint commission on Oceanography and Marine Meteorology, of the world meteorological organization and the UNESCO intergovernmental Oceanographic commission that aims to generate wave climate projections (ultimately of global extent) and aid comprehensive assessments of their cascading uncertainty. Soon after the last COWCLIP meeting (held in Paris in October 2014), the IPCC/WCRP issued a document stating the lessons learned from the AR5, which identifies COWCLIP as being a required activity into the future to resolve issues around coastal impacts of climate change.

Large scale global wave simulations will be performed using the WAM model forced by wind and iced data from EC-EARTH integrations. The WRF meteorological model will also be forced with EC –Earth data in order to produced high resolution wind field to me used both in the regional analysis and in as input for the SWAN wave model. SWAN will also use spectral boundary data provided from WAM simulations.

It was clear before that the use of a higher resolution and better quality reanalysis in the downscaling process should bring added value to the study of the regional present surface wind and wave climate in the Iberian Peninsula waters as it did in other regions of the globe. This was confirmed in CLIBECO and will be now expanded to ensemble simulations.

Being a follow-up of the CLIBECO exploratory project, it aims to expand the methodology that was implemented to longer periods and to three climatic integrations. This new project will give us the opportunity to be more efficient as most of the production chain problems were already identified and solved. It would allow us to extend the project to a multi member ensemble analysis, producing three members of an international ensemble organized by the COWCLIP community

The production of this ensemble data, both global and regional, will give us the opportunity to take several actions:

1) To participate in the COWCLIP community effort, contributing with simulations produced within MARCLIM but also having access to other simulations produced by other member of the COWCLIP community.

2) Perform a complete and robots analysis of the evolution of the large scale to regional wave and wind climates (from the North Atlantic sub-basin to the Iberian Peninsula waters) in the twenty-first century in a warming climate, based on the EC-Earth global climate system global simulations that were set up to follow the CMIP5 protocol using the RCP AR5 emission scenarios. An ensemble analysis will be possible to make. This study will also contribute to the EC-EARTH community effort.

3) Evaluate changes in marine extreme events, using both Lagrangean and Eulerian methodologies, contributing to the safeguard people and property, in the sea and costal areas.

4) Evaluate changes in off-shore wind and wave energy potential, from the present until the end of the 21st century, providing precious information regarding decision making and planning of resource exploration sites. This type of assessment had performed within the MAREN project, for present climate conditions, using hindcasts and reanalysis data, but the assessment of changes in energy potential under climate change conditions has not yet been made. Energy potential will be assessed per decade from 1970 to 2100.

5) Evaluate the uncertainty of the marine climate projections.

Extreme wind and wave modeling and statistics in the Atlantic Ocean Call name:
PTDC/EAM-OCE/31325/2017 2018 - 2021

Role in this project: Key expert

Coordinating institution: CENTEC- Centre for Marine Technology and Ocean Engineering , Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa

Project partners: CENTEC- Centre for Marine Technology and Ocean Engineering , Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa ()

Affiliation: CENTEC- Centre for Marine Technology and Ocean Engineering , Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa ()

Project website:

Abstract:

EUropean Provision Of Regional Impact Assessment on a Seasonal-to-decadal timescale Call name:
2012 - 2017

Role in this project: Key expert

Coordinating institution: MetOffice

Project partners: MetOffice (); Portuguese Institute for the Sea and the Atmosphere ()

Affiliation: Portuguese Institute for the Sea and the Atmosphere ()

Project website:

Abstract:

Present and future marine climate in the Iberian coast Call name:
EXPL / AAG-MAA / 1001/2013 2014 - 2015

Role in this project: Project coordinator

Coordinating institution: Centre for Marine Technology and Ocean Engineering (CENTEC), Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa

Project partners: Centre for Marine Technology and Ocean Engineering (CENTEC), Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa ()

Affiliation: Centre for Marine Technology and Ocean Engineering (CENTEC), Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa ()

Project website:

Abstract:

The knowledge of the marine climate is very important for design and ship routing, coastal infrastructures, harbor management, offshore wind farms, wave energy converters, etc. Near coastlines processes associated with the coastal boundary add additional complexity (interaction between terrain-induced flows and sea/land breezes, sharp sea-land temperature gradients, complex air-sea exchanging processes, etc.). These mesoscale processes affect a region of a few tens of km wide, but are an important source of variability to a much wider region.

Waves imply a feedback to the atmosphere, affecting the evolution of weather systems (Rutgersson et al. 2010), in high surface wind speeds, when the wave field is dominated by young waves (wind sea), or affecting the turbulence structure of the marine boundary layer, when the wave field is dominated by old waves (swell), and the momentum flux reverses and can be directed upwards (Semedo et al. 2009). The atmosphere and the ocean are constantly “exchanging information” and air-sea fluxes and mass exchanging processes are modulated by the waves. Climate change has become an important issue in coastal management as changes in wave climate that may occur might have significant impacts on coasts and humane activities.

The objective of this project is to study the marine climates off the Atlantic coasts of the Iberian Peninsula (here defined as the close to surface winds and waves, with a special focus on the coasts of Portugal main land. The goal of the proposed project is twofold: on the one hand it aims to study the present marine climate, from 1979 to 2012, off the coasts of the Iberian Peninsula, and on the other hand it aims to study the impact of global warming on the twenty-first century marine climate in the same area.

Reanalysis have been used for global climate studies (e.g., Sterl and Caires 2005, Semedo et al. 2011) but due to their coarse resolution and storing output frequency, they are not suited for coastal climate studies. The atmospheric and oceanographic coastal circulations require high horizontal resolutions for the representation of mesoscale processes. Therefore global reanalysis are usually dynamically downscaled to coastal areas, with higher spatial and temporal resolutions. Most of the available downscaling projects were based on reanalysis that stopped being produced (e.g. NORA10 – Reistad et al. 2010 –, based on the ECMWF forecasts – ECMWF– ERA-40 reanalysis,), or were not continued (e.g. HIPOCAS, - Guedes Soares 2008). The AMIC (Assessing the Mid-Century Climate transition: contributing to an ensemble of global and regional decadal simulations) a FCT funded project as however produced a statistically downscaled meteorological data set from the ERA- interim reanalysis (Dee et al. 2011) that includes the Iberian Peninsula costal water at a 9 km spatial resolution, that was recently made available.

To assess the variability of the marine climate off the coasts of the Iberian Peninsula, particularly in the last 10 years, the combined high resolution atmospheric downscaled wind field (from AMIC) and the spectral wave data (from the ERA-interim) will be used to produced a high resolution wave hindcast. Statistical analysis of the marine climate data ( wind and wave) will be performed, in order to assess the spatial and temporal variability (annual to decadal) of the marine fields and how it is linked to the large scale atmospheric circulation (represented, for example, by the North Atlantic Oscillation – NAO – index.

Future changes in wave conditions received minimal attention in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) forth assessment report, despite the recognition that wave heights have changed over four large portions of the global ocean through the historical record (Hemer et al. 2010). A recent cooperative effort under the Coordinated Ocean Wave Climate Projections (COWCLIP) group (Hemer et.al. 2012a), pointed out that coordinated regional studies should also be pursuit.

The second goal of the project aims to study the evolution of the large scale to regional wave and wind climates (from the North Atlantic sub-basin to the Iberian Peninsula waters) in the twenty-first century in a warming climate. This part of the study will follow two steps, and is based on the EC-Earth (Hazeleger et al., 2010) global climate system global simulations that were set up to follow the CMIP5 protocol using the RCP AR5 emission scenarios. First the future marine climate in the North Atlantic sub-basin will be investigated in two separate periods that are representative of the end of the 20th (1970-2000) and the end of the 21th (2070-2100) centuries. Second the North Atlantic EC-Earth wave fields, for the same periods, will be downscaled to an area off the coast of the Iberian Peninsula, allowing the study of the impact of global warming on the regional marine climate for that area.

Developing a European Earth system model based on ECMWF modeling tools Call name:
2010 - 2014

Role in this project: Key expert

Coordinating institution: Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute

Project partners: Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (); Portuguese Institute for the Sea and the Atmosphere ()

Affiliation: Portuguese Institute for the Sea and the Atmosphere ()

Project website:

Abstract:

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