Direct water mass renewal through convection deeper than 1000 m and the independent process of dense water production through brine rejection during sea ice formation occur at only a limited number of sites globally. Our late winter observations in 2000 and 2001 show that the Japan (East) Sea is a part of both exclusive groups. Japan Sea deep convection apparently occurs every winter, but massive renewal of bottom waters through brine rejection had not occurred for many decades prior to the extremely cold winter of 2001. The sites for both renewal mechanisms are south of Vladivostok, in the path of cold continental air outbreaks.

The Japan/East Sea is a major anomaly in the ventilation and overturn picture of the Pacifi c Ocean. The North Pacifi c is well known to be nearly unventilated at intermediate and abyssal depths, refl ected in low oxygen concentration at 1000 m (Figure 1). (High oxygen indicates newer water in more recent contact with the atmosphere. Oxygen declines as water "ages" after it leaves the sea surface mainly because of bacterial respiration.) Even the small production of North Pacifi c Intermediate Water in the Okhotsk Sea (Talley, 1991; Shcherbina et al., 2003) and the tiny amount of new bottom water encountered in the deep Bering Sea (Warner and Roden, 1995) have no obvious impact on the overall oxygen distribution at 1000 m and below, down to 3500 m, which is the approximate maximum depth of the Bering, Okhotsk, and Japan/East Seas. In contrast, the nearly isolated Japan/East Sea is very well ventilated at all depths from the surface to the bottom. Oxygen is higher than anywhere else in the Pacifi c, even in the South Pacifi c, where intermediate-layer ventilation yields relatively high oxygen content at 1000 dbar (roughly 1000-m depth). It is necessary to look much farther away, to the North Atlantic and best-ventilated sectors of the Antarctic, to fi nd deep ventilation comparable to the Japan/East Sea's. Because it is ventilated from top to bottom and located at mid-latitude, the Japan/East Sea has many similarities to the North Atlantic Ocean (e.g., Riser and Jacobs, 2005; Min and Warner, 2005). Both have (1) infl ow of warm, saline surface waters from the south; (2) subduction that ventilates the upper ocean in the subtropics; (3) subtropical mode waters; (4) a subpolar front south of which a low-salinity water mass is formed; (5) cooling and precipitation that cause a colder, fresher subpolar north; (6) subpolar mode waters with comparable winter mixed-layer thicknesses; and (7) deep convection and ice formation that ventilate the entire water column. The Japan/East Sea differs from the North Atlantic in two major respects: (1) the powerful northward eastern boundary current in the Japan/East Sea, the Tsushima Warm Current, distorts the subtropical gyre, and (2) the Japan/East Sea is isolated from all subsurface waters in the North Pacifi c. Therefore, the Japan/East Sea's salinity is nearly uniform below the shallow sill depth (140 m) of Tsushima Strait. The Japan/East Sea has a full temperature range, however, because surface waters cool to freezing and some of this very cold water becomes bottom water. In its isolation, the Japan/East Sea most closely resembles the Mediterranean Sea-both seas form dense water as a result of convection during winter cold-air outbreaks (Talley et al., 2003; Marshall and Schott, 1999).

We observed a sudden initiation of bottom‐water formation in the East/Japan Sea associated with a severely cold winter in 2000–2001. An increase in dissolved oxygen concentration as well as decreases in temperature and nutrient concentrations for the bottom waters provides unequivocal evidence that cold, oxygen‐rich and nutrient‐poor surface waters were injected directly to the bottom. Since the conveyor‐belt in the East Sea has been undergoing dramatic change with a complete halt to bottom‐water formation since the mid‐1980s, this sudden episode of bottom‐water formation could easily be detected. Though the amount of bottom water formed was rather small, being only about 0.03% of the volume in the past time, the observation clearly demonstrates that the conveyor‐belt is directly connected to the weather system.

We use dynamical systems approach and Lagrangian tools to study surface transport and mixing of water masses in a selected coastal region of the Japan Sea with moving mesoscale eddies associated with the Primorskoye Current. Lagrangian trajectories are computed for a large number of particles in an interpolated velocity field generated by a numerical regional multi-layer eddy-resolving circulation model. We compute finite-time Lyapunov exponents for a comparatively long period of time by the method developed and plot the Lyapunov synoptic map quantifying surface transport and mixing in that region. This map uncovers the striking flow structures along the coast with a mesoscale eddy street and repelling material lines. We propose new Lagrangian diagnostic tools --- the time of exit of particles off a selected box, the number of changes of the sign of zonal and meridional velocities --- to study transport and mixing by a pair of strongly interacting eddies often visible at sea-surface temperature satellite images in that region. We develop a technique to track evolution of clusters of particles, streaklines and material lines. The Lagrangian tools used allow us to reveal mesoscale eddies and their structure, to track different phases of the coastal flow, to find inhomogeneous character of transport and mixing on mesoscales and submesoscales and to quantify mixing by the values of exit times and the number of times particles wind around the eddy's center

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Homomorphic filter approach for image processing is very known as a way for image dynamic range and contrast increasing. According to this approach input signal is assumed to be consist of two multiplicative component: background and details. Standard problem to process such signals involves logarithm operation, division on two components by implementing low frequency and high-pass filters, addition of evaluations multiplied by different gain coefficients, and then exponent calculation. In this paper we have proposed to use median filter for deriving multiplicative component evaluations. It was found that proposed homomorphic filter has several useful properties in remote sensing image enhancement applications. Experimental results for simulated and real image processing are presented in the paper.

The output from an eddy-resolved multi-layered circulation model is used to analyze the vertical structure of simulated deep-sea eddies in the Japan Basin of the Japan/East Sea constrained by bottom topography. We focus on Lagrangian analysis of anticyclonic eddies, generated in the model in a typical year approximately at the place of the M3 mooring (Takematsu et al., 1999) and the hydrographic sections (Talley et al., 2001), where such eddies have been regularly observed in different years (1993)(1994)(1995)(1996)(1997)(1999)(2000)(2001). Using a quasi-3D computation of the finite-time Lyapunov exponents and displacements for a large number of synthetic tracers in each depth layer, we demonstrate how the simulated feature evolves of the eddy, that does not reach the surface in summer, into a one reaching the surface in fall. This finding is confirmed by computing deformation of the model layers across the simulated eddy in zonal and meridional directions and in the corresponding temperature cross sections. Computed Lagrangian tracking maps allow to trace the origin and fate of water masses in different layers of the eddy. The results of simulation are compared with observed temperature zonal and meridional cross sections of a real anticyclonic eddy to be studied at that place during the oceanographic Conductivity, Temperature, and Depth (CTD) hydrochemical survey in summer 1999 (Talley et al., 2001). Both the simulated and observed eddies are shown to have the similar eddy core and the relief of layer interfaces and isotherms.

The AUDIT-like tests system was created for complex assessment and evaluation of the addictive status of adolescents in a Ukrainian population. The AUDIT-like tests system has been created from the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test (AUDIT) developed by the World Health Organization. The AUDIT-like tests were minimally modified from the original AUDIT. Attention was brought to similarities between stages of different addictions (TV, computer games, the Internet, etc.) and alcohol addiction. Seventeen AUDIT-like tests were created to detect the different types of chemical and non-chemical addictions.