25 years of operations at the European Station For Time-series in the Ocean, Canary Islands (ESTOC). Insights from events to long-term variability signals

Andres Cianca1, Marimar Villagarcia1, Eric Delory2, Carlos Barrera3, Laura Cardona Díaz1, Maria Jose Rueda1 and Octavio Llinas1, (1)Oceanic Platform of the Canary Islands, Telde, Spain, (2)Oceanic Platform of the Canary Islands, Observatory, Telde, Spain, (3)Oceanic Platform of the Canary Islands, Underwater Vehicles, Telde, Spain
Abstract:
The European Station for Time series in the Ocean, Canary Islands (ESTOC) started operating in February 1994 with the support of the Global Joint Study of Ocean Flow (JGOFS). This international agreement favored the launch of seven multidisciplinary observational programs such as Bermuda Atlantic Time-series Study (BATS), Hawaii Ocean Time-series (HOT) and others during the late eighties and nineties of the last century.

The objective of these observational programs was to create long time series that would allow facing studies of carbon and nitrogen cycles in the ocean, as well as those of long-term variability in hydrography and biogeochemical processes. Nowadays, the existence of these time series programs has greatly improved our understanding of the biogeochemical cycles in the ocean, and their trends over the past 30 years.

However, the high costs of these observation programs in parallel with the technological developments for new observational approaches, have led to the disappearance of some of them, and in other cases have produced changes in comparison with the initial observational strategy. For instance, ESTOC currently continues the observation after 25 years with some changes, using and combining some of the new technologies with the initial methodologies, along with adapting to the new global observation framework in order to improve regional and global results.

This work aims to present some significant results obtained using the ESTOC time series, both solely or in comparison with other time series programs. These outputs will emphasize the variability of essential variables associated with particular events that occurred on a short time scale, as well as the long-term variability and trends encountered during the operational life of ESTOC. Our results will also include a combination of data acquired from the different observation platforms currently used at ESTOC.

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