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 aims to describe the environmental conditions on the NL shelf and in the Northwest Atlantic as a whole. It consists of annual normalized anomalies of 10 subindices with equal contribution: Winter North Atlantic Oscillation, air temperature, sea ice season severity, iceberg count, sea surface temperature, vertically-averaged temperature and salinity at the Atlantic Zone Monitoring Program (AZMP) Station 27, cold intermediate layer (CIL) core temperature at AZMP Station 27, CIL area on 3 AZMP hydrographic sections and bottom temperature on the NL shelf. This index runs from 1951 to 2019, is open-access, and will be updated annually. This index and the subindices are available at https://doi.org/10.20383/101.0301 (Cyr and Galbraith, 2020).