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The geochemical measurements within the long-lived, crustose coralline red alga Clathromorphum compactum in calibration experiments, and the environmental conditions selected for the controlled laboratory aquaria.

A tool for multidimensional variational analysis (divand) is presented. It allows the interpolation and analysis of observations on curvilinear orthogonal grids in an arbitrary high dimensional space by minimizing a cost function. This cost function penalizes the deviation from the observations, the deviation from a first guess and abruptly varying fields based on a given correlation length (potentially varying in space and time). Additional constraints can be added to this cost function such as an advection constraint which forces the analysed field to align with the ocean current. The method decouples naturally disconnected areas based on topography and topology. This is useful in oceanography where disconnected water masses often have different physical properties. Individual elements of the a priori and a posteriori error covariance matrix can also be computed, in particular expected error variances of the analysis. A multidimensional approach (as opposed to stacking 2-dimensional analysis) has the benefit of providing a smooth analysis in all dimensions, although the computational cost is increased. Primal (problem solved in the grid space) and dual formulations (problem solved in the observational space) are implemented using either direct solvers (based on Cholesky factorization) or iterative solvers (conjugate gradient method). In most applications the primal formulation with the direct solver is the fastest, especially if an a posteriori error estimate is needed. However, for correlated observation errors the dual formulation with an iterative solver is more efficient. The method is tested by using pseudo observations from a global model. The distribution of the observations is based on the position of the ARGO floats. The benefit of the 3-dimensional analysis (longitude, latitude and time) compared to 2-dimensional analysis (longitude and latitude) and the role of the advection constraint are highlighted. The tool divand is free software, and is distributed under the terms of the GPL license (http://modb.oce.ulg.ac.be/mediawiki/index.php/divand). PREDANTAR, EMODNET Chemistry 2, SeaDataNet II

In permafrost areas, seasonal freeze-thaw cycles result in upward and downward movements of the ground. For some permafrost areas, long-term downward movements were reported during the last decade. We measured seasonal and multi-year ground movements in a yedoma region of the Lena River Delta, Siberia, in 2013–2017, using reference rods installed deep in the permafrost. The seasonal subsidence was 1.7 ± 1.5 cm in the cold summer of 2013 and 4.8 ± 2 cm in the warm summer of 2014. Furthermore, we measured a pronounced multi-year net subsidence of 9.3 ± 5.7 cm from spring 2013 to the end of summer 2017. Importantly, we observed a high spatial variability of subsidence of up to 6 cm across a sub-meter horizontal scale. In summer 2013, we accompanied our field measurements with Differential Synthetic Aperture Radar Interferometry (DInSAR) on repeat-pass TerraSAR-X (TSX) data from the summer of 2013 to detect summer thaw subsidence over the same study area. Interferometry was strongly affected by a fast phase coherence loss, atmospheric artifacts, and possibly the choice of reference point. A cumulative ground movement map, built from a continuous interferogram stack, did not reveal a subsidence on the upland but showed a distinct subsidence of up to 2 cm in most of the thermokarst basins. There, the spatial pattern of DInSAR-measured subsidence corresponded well with relative surface wetness identified with the near infra-red band of a high-resolution optical image. Our study suggests that (i) although X-band SAR has serious limitations for ground movement monitoring in permafrost landscapes, it can provide valuable information for specific environments like thermokarst basins, and (ii) due to the high sub-pixel spatial variability of ground movements, a validation scheme needs to be developed and implemented for future DInSAR studies in permafrost environments.