A climate index for the Newfoundland and Labrador shelf

Abstract

This study presents in detail a new climate index for the Newfoundland and Labrador (NL) shelf. The NL climate index (NLCI) aims to describe the environmental conditions on the NL shelf and in the Northwest Atlantic as a whole. It consists of the average of 10 normalized anomalies, or subindices, derived annually: winter North Atlantic Oscillation, air temperature, sea ice season severity, iceberg count, seasonal sea surface temperature, vertically averaged temperature and salinity at the Atlantic Zone Monitoring Program (AZMP) Station 27, summer cold intermediate layer (CIL) core temperature at AZMP Station 27, summer CIL area on three AZMP hydrographic sections, and bottom temperature on the NL shelf. This index runs from 1951 to 2020 and will be updated annually. It provides continuity in the production of advice for fisheries management and ecosystem status on the NL shelf, for which a similar but recently abandoned index was used. The new climate index and its subindices are available at https://doi.org/10.20383/101.0301 (Cyr and Galbraith, 2020).