In winter 1995 the last major field work of the Physical Oceanography of the Eastern Mediterranean (POEM) program was carried out, the Levantine Intermediate Water Experiment (LIWEX). In this study a thorough analysis is presented of the data set collected during three successive surveys in January, February, and March–April 1995. The major overall result is that the Levantine basin is shown to be the site for multiple, and different, water mass formation processes. Levantine Deep Water (LDW) was formed in the Rhodes gyre, with the preconditioning phase starting in December 1994. In late January the chimney was ventilating to the atmosphere. In February the strong mixing phase is documented by the convective cell vertically homogeneous to 900 m depth. In March–April, recapping has occurred in the upper 200 m. LDW remained confined inside the Rhodes gyre cyclonic circulation. Levantine Intermediate Water (LIW) is instead deeply affected by the upper thermocline circulation. Shallow ventilating chimneys with the LIW thermostads were found in the January survey inside the cyclonic region of the northern Levantine. The formation process of LIW does not involve deep penetrative convection. Winter surface cooling and evaporation are sufficient to produce a surface mixed layer 100 m deep with LIW characteristics. At the mixed layer basis, LIW subducts and spreads along isopycnal surfaces along pathways determined by the cyclonic/anticyclonic structures of the upper thermocline circulation.
Abstract. Assessing the potential improvement of basin scale ecosystem forecasting for the Mediterranean Sea requires biochemical data assimilation techniques. To this aim, a feasibility study of surface biomass assimilation is performed following an identical twin experiment approach. NPZD ecosystem data generator, embedded in one eighth degree general circulation model, is integrated with the reduced-order optimal interpolation System for Ocean Forecasting and Analysis.The synthetic "sea-truth" data are winter daily averages obtained from the control run (CR). The twin experiments consist in performing two runs: the free run (FR) with summer-depleted phytoplankton initial conditions and the assimilated run (AR), in which, starting from the same FR phytoplankton concentrations, weekly surface biomasses averaged from the CR data are assimilated. The FR and AR initial conditions modify the winter bloom state of the phytoplankton all over the basin and reduce the total nitrogen, i.e. the energy of the biochemical ecosystem.The results of this feasibility study shows good performance of the system in the case of phytoplankton, zooplankton, detritus and surface inorganic nitrogen. The weak results in the case of basin inorganic nitrogen and total nitrogen, the latter nonperformant at surface, are discussed.
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