THE TRANSMED PROGRAM

The fully-autonomous and low-cost thermosalinometer system TRANSMED has been developed to enable monitoring the Sea Surface Temperature (SST) and the Sea Surface Salinity (SSS) over the whole Mediterranean Sea, as a CIESM initiative initially. Indeed the Mediterranean displays an intense meso-scale variability in both space and time, so that capturing the long-term variability and extracting a potential climatological signal is a challenge. Moreover, its central and southern parts are little known, and lack sampling facilities. The objective of TRANSMED is to use the regular routes and schedules of ships of opportunity to record SST and SSS underway, and assemble long-term time series.