DETECTION AND ANALYSIS OF FRONTS IN THE NORTH SEA

摘要

Oceanic shelf sea fronts have great effects on localrndynamics, the ecology and the climate. The developmentrnof algorithms which automatically detect frontalrnpositions and gradients from earth observation (EO)rndata is an important pre-condition for the processing ofrnlong EO data time series which are used to establish arnclimatology for North Sea fronts. An algorithm basedrnon the gradient algorithm of Canny [1] and thernhistogram algorithm of Cayula and Cornillon [2] hasrnbeen developed which preserves the main principles ofrnboth algorithms. Applying to sea surface temperaturernand ocean colour parameters opens the possibility ofrndetecting and investigating frontal positions andrngradients and of deriving reliable reference data tornassess the impacts of climate change on fronts.