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In 1997, Artegiani et al. depicted for the first time the seasonal climatology of the Adriatic Sea; they used the ATOS data set, formed by 5540 oceanographic stations sampled over this continental basin from 1911 to 1980. Lately, two Italian institutes working on the Adriatic Sea for long time, IBM and IRPEM, merged their recent data sets for the northernmost part of the basin. This yielded 3600 new oceanographic stations, concentrated in an area where 809 ATOS stations were located. The new data were quality checked, and then a seasonal climatology was drawn up as a first analysis step. The new climatology differed significantly from the ATOS results; this could be explained, at least partially, by the climatic changes that have occurred on this area. For example, air temperature increased significantly over northern Italy starting from 1988. Variations of the observed air temperature and Po River runoff qualitatively agree with sea surface temperature and salinity variations. A preliminary computation of heat fluxes based on ECMWF reanalysis confirms an increased heat flux to the Northern Adriatic Sea starting from 1988. ProblemThe Adriatic Sea (Fig. 1) is an elongated continental basin (with the major axis in the SE-NW direction) of the Mediterranean Sea, surrounded by the Italian Peninsula (west) and the Balkans (east). The Adriatic basin is divided into Northern, Central and Southern sub-basins. The separation between the Northern and the Central sub-basins has been variously positioned; Artegiani et al. (1997a) placed it farther south, in front of Giulianova, along the 100 m isobath, but they and Zavatarelli et al. (1998) distinguished the area shallower than 40 m from the deeper one. The former area is a small fraction of the Adriatic basin surface, and, being very shallow (mean depth about P.S

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