Spatiotemporal Analysis of Seawatch Buoy Meteorological Observations

Abstract

In the present study, we analyzed meteorological observations from Seawatch buoys in the Mediterranean Sea and specifically from locations in the Aegean and Ionian Sea. The data were collected from buoys that have been deployed by the Hellenic Center for Marine Research (HCMR) in the framework of the POSEIDON project. Our aim was to understand the spatiotemporal underlying characteristics of the meteorological conditions and identify correlation patterns between different locations. For each time series at a given buoy location we estimated mainly non-linear measures such as mutual information combined with simple descriptive statistic measures, as well as some other dynamics detectors such as Hurst Exponent and Hjorth parameters. Furthermore, the relationships between the meteorological variables were investigated using the cross correlation method as well as Granger causality methodology for identification of direction interactions among variables. The results show that the combination of the proposed methods reveals information about the spatiotemporal characteristics of the time series. © 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.