The acquired experience taken over the last 17 years of missions to the ESTOC (European Station for Time series in the Ocean, Canary Islands) oceanic station has provided a historical background about surface and mid-water meteorological, physical and biogeochemical variables.
The recent transfer of mandate of ESTOC to PLOCAN (Oceanic Platform of the Canary Islands) guarantees the operational sustainability of this deep observatory until 2023. This oceanic observatory has become one of the three means of observation that the singular infrastructure has. The other two are:
- The coastal observatory, which is a real time permanent observing system used as an instrumentation test site too, and which includes a cabled system for observation.
- The extended observatory, a mobile observing system carrying out coastal, regional and global observation missions.
This integral and complex observatory aims to become part of the emerging pan-European networks, offering an extension towards the southern boundaries of interest. The management of a base for underwater vehicles and instruments, jointly with the test-site instrumentation and the existence of a long-term oceanic time series at ESTOC, will permit to focus on, upgrade and enhance the quality, quantity, projection and usefulness of such an integrated observatory. The data collected expects to contribute to the understanding of factors affecting the ocean in key issues like climate change, acidification, biogeochemistry, upwelling and Saharan dust affection, among others.
