Mediterranean circulation and climate change

Responsible : Isabelle Taupier - Letage

If you think that the Mediterranean is just plain blue and calm, look at the reality with the satellite thermal pictures: eddies and packs of entangled eddies actually fill the (sub)basins of the Mediterranean. Such (mesoscale) eddies induce a high variability of the currents in both time and space.

This complexity then puts oceanographers through an ordeal -and potentially leads to different analyses of the observations.

• What do we know for certain on the water masses circulation (currents) in the Mediterranean nowadays?
• Do all oceanographers agree on the circulations schemas?
• What is the impact of climate change on the temperature and salinity of the Mediterranean?