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Geophysical Monograph 202


The Mediterranean Sea

Temporal Variability and Spatial Patterns

Gian Luca Eusebi Borzelli

Miroslav Gačić

Piero Lionello

Paola Malanotte-Rizzoli

Editors

This work is a co-publication of the American Geophysical Union and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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This book is a tribute to our colleagues Allan Robinson and Volfango Rupolo.

Contributors

Ali Aydoğdu
Institute of Marine Sciences, METU, Erdemli, Mersin, Turkey

Manuel Bensi
Istituto Nazionale di Oceanografia e di Geofisica Sperimentale (OGS), Sgonico (Trieste), Italy

Mireno Borghini
Istituto di Scienze Marine—ISMAR, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR), Lerici (SP), Italy

Harry Bryden
National Oceanography Centre Southampton, University of Southampton, Empress Dock, Southampton, United Kingdom; Istituto di Scienze Marine—ISMAR, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR), Venice, Italy

Vanessa Cardin
Istituto Nazionale di Oceanografia e di Geofisica Sperimentale (OGS), Sgonico (Trieste), Italy

Sotiria Georgiou
University of Athens, Athens, Greece

Isaac Gertman
Israel Oceanographic and Limnological Research, Haifa, Israel

Dagmar Hainbucher
Institut für Meereskunde, ZMAW, Universität Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany

Artur Hecht
Israel Oceanographic and Limnological Research, Haifa, Israel

R. Iacono
ENEA—C. R. Casaccia, Roma, Italy

Birgit Klein
Bundesanstalt für Seeschifffahrt und Hydrographie, Hamburg, Germany

Gerasimos Korres
Hellenic Center for Marine Research, Institute of Oceanography, Anavyssos, Greece

George Krokos
Hellenic Center for Marine Research, Institute of Oceanography, Anavyssos, Greece

Alex Lascaratos
University of Athens, Athens, Greece

Mohammed Abdul Latif
Institute of Marine Sciences, METU, Erdemli, Mersin, Turkey

L. Liberti
Istituto Superiore per la Protezione e la Ricerca Ambientale, Rome, Italy

Anneta Mantziafou
University of Athens, Athens, Greece

S. Marullo
ENEA—C. R. Frascati, Frascati, Italy

E. Napolitano
ENEA—C. R. Casaccia, Roma, Italy

Emin Özsoy
Institute of Marine Sciences, METU, Erdemli, Mersin, Turkey

Vassilis Papadopoulos
Hellenic Centre for Marine Research, Patras, Greece

Ananda Pascual
IMEDEA (CSIC-UIB), Esporles, Mallorca, Spain

L. Pratt
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Woods Hole, Massachusetts, USA

Wolfgang Roether
Institut für Umweltphysik, Univ. Bremen, Bremen, Germany

Angelo Rubino
Dipartimento di Scienze Ambientali, Informatica e Statistica, Universita' Ca' Foscari di Venezia, Venezia, Italy

Simón Ruiz
IMEDEA (CSIC-UIB), Esporles, Mallorca, Spain

J. C. Sánchez-Garrido
Grupo de Oceanografía Física. Dpto. Física Aplicada II, Campus de Teatinos, University of Malaga, Malaga, Spain

Gianmaria Sannino
Climate and Impact Modeling Lab—Energy and Environment Modeling Unit—ENEA, CR Casaccia, Rome, Italy

Katrin Schroeder
Istituto di Scienze Marine—ISMAR, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR), Venice, Italy

Sarantis Sofianos
University of Athens, Athens, Greece

Samuel Somot
MeteoFrance, Toulouse, France

Stefania Sparnocchia
Istituto di Scienze Marine—ISMAR, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR), Trieste, Italy

Alexander Theocharis
Hellenic Center for Marine Research, Institute of Oceanography, Anavyssos, Greece

Ersin Tutsak
Institute of Marine Sciences, METU, Erdemli, Mersin, Turkey

Dimitris Velaoras
Hellenic Center for Marine Research, Institute of Oceanography, Anavyssos, Greece

Anna Vetrano
Istituto di Scienze Marine—ISMAR, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR), Lerici (SP), Italy

Enrique Vidal-Vijande
IMEDEA (CSIC-UIB), Esporles, Mallorca, Spain

Preface

This book covers important issues of the Mediterranean dynamics. In this relatively small body of water, fundamental ocean processes, such as surface wind forcing, buoyancy fluxes, lateral mass exchange, and deep convection, take place analogously to the world ocean, but over shorter spatial and temporal scales, simplifying the logistics necessary for monitoring. This makes the Mediterranean a laboratory for processes characterizing the global ocean and its climate.

The 1980s represent a crossroad in the study of the Mediterranean Sea. Indeed, during the second half of the 1980s, several large-scale, long-term international experiments were conducted and provided a wealth of oceanographic information. Four large international programs—the Gibraltar Experiment, the Physical Oceanography of the Eastern Mediterranean, which in 1990 evolved into the fully interdisciplinary program named POEM-Biology and Chemistry (POEM-BC), the Western Mediterranean Circulation Experiment, and PRIMO—defined the major characteristics of the Mediterranean Sea. The picture of the Mediterranean variability emerging from this fieldwork was complex and showed that multiple interacting time and spatial scales (basin, subbasin, and mesoscale), representing a wide variety of physical processes, characterize the Mediterranean dynamics.

The aforementioned programs ended by the second half of the 1990s. Since then, although valuable studies were carried out, uncoordinated research efforts, driven mainly by national interests, provided fragmented and sporadic results.

To establish the state of the art of the research in the Mediterranean and allow interested scientists to interact, the Space Academy Foundation, a nonprofit organization to promote space-science, and technology, CIESM, and the OGS (Istituto Nazionale di Oceanografia e di Geofisica Sperimentale), under the aegis of the Alta Presidenza della Repubblica Italiana, organized a fully interdisciplinary meeting, which was held in Rome on 7–8 November 2011 at the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei. This book is the outcome of this effort and it is meant to be an important and original contribution to the knowledge of the phenomena that regulate the oceanography of the Mediterranean Sea.

Gian Luca Eusebi Borzelli, CERSE (Center for Remote Sensing of the Earth), Rome, Italy;
OGS (Istituto Nazionale di Oceanografia e di Geofisica Sperimenta), Italy

Miroslav Gačić, National Institute of Oceanography and Experimental Geophysics, Italy

Piero Lionello, University of Salento, Italy

Paola Malanotte-Rizzoli, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA