CoAuthors

Heber Joctan Uc Gonzalez (Instituto Epomex, Mexico); Eder Andrei Hernandez Martinez (Instituto Epomex, Mexico); Gregorio Posada Vanegas (Instituto Epomex, Mexico)

Since spring 2017, the coastal zone off Campeche coast has been equipped with different measuring technologies aiming to study a coastal ocean. Tide gauges, weather stations, CTD and ADCP moorings, as well as HF radars, together they form what it has been called Campeche Ocean Observing System (Observatorio Marino Campechano). The main purpose of the project is to acquire quality data to analyze the dynamics of the shallow ocean waters of Campeche coasts. The region is characterized by a huge continental plataform, also known as Campeche Bank, with an average slope of -0.5/1000 offshore (-15m/30 km) where strong weather events occur, like hurricanes and northern wind cold surges, known as “Nortes”, making it a very particular region. In general there is very few in situ data of this region, sparse in time and space without any continuity, whereas the idea of the observatory is to start generating long-time series of the places were the equipments has been established, and make these date available to the scientific community. In order to ameliorate the lack of information of the region, satellite data has been proposed as a source of evidence, unfortunately, in the particular case of Sea level comparisons between mooring observations v.s. satellite altimetry data has shown poor correlations (< 30 %), which complicates the use of ocean currents, derived from the altimetric data, in the region. We hope that in the near future, the in situ data gathered by the observatory would be of help to the altimetric community, in order to improve coastal altimetric measurements of this region.