"Red ACOMAR canarias": A new European regional contribution for GOOS

Abstract

Since early 90's, Canary Islands Archipelago represents a very important working area for operational oceanography in Europe. Spanish and other european research groups, joining common projects (ANIMATE, MERSEA, ALERMAC,...), have an important and multidisciplinary group of devices placed in the area: deep ocean mooring lines, ocean ODAS buoys, the long-time series station ESTOC,...all of them are still working. For this reason, the area can be considered a new regional contribution to the Global Ocean Observing System (GOOS) under the name of "Red ACOMAR Canarias" (A: Alert, C: Control, O: Observation, MAR: Marine). Nowadays, the Red ACOMAR has a new component, following the protocols and rules of COOP (Coastal Ocean Observing Panel): a real-time moored buoy coastal network. Its first deployment stage has been completed with a total number of fifteen moored buoys around its coastal areas (six units of classical ODAS buoys and nine units of specific buoys for hydrocarbon detection -SeaMon_HC-), including two buoy units in Madera Archipelago (Portugal) as an special international cooperation at the Macaronesian region. The buoys are autonomous monitoring systems fully developed at ICCM, able to measure and transmit in real time useful information concerning environmental physical and bio-chemical variables of interest for different socio-economic important sectors (harbours, wastewater, aquaculture, beaches and marine recreational areas...) witch make an exhaustive use of the costal areas in Canary Islands.