EGU21-4290
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu21-4290
EGU General Assembly 2021
© Author(s) 2023. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Lagrangian eddy tracking reveals the Eratosthenes anticyclonicattractor in the eastern Levantine basin

Alexandre Barboni1,2, Ayah Lazar3, Alexandre Stegner1, and Evangelos Moschos1
Alexandre Barboni et al.
  • 1Ecole Polytechnique, LMD, France (alexandre.barboni@polytechnique.edu)
  • 2Département de Géosciences, ENS Paris, France
  • 3Israel Oceanographic and Limnological Research Center, Haifa, Israel

Statistics of anticyclone activity and trajectories in the southeastern Mediterranean sea over the period 2000-2018
is created using the DYNED atlas, which links the automated mesoscale eddy detection by the AMEDA algorithm with in
situ oceanographic observations. This easternmost region of the Mediterranean sea, delimited by the Levantine coast and
Cyprus, has a complex eddying activity, which has not yet been fully characterized. Using Lagrangian tracking
to investigate the eddy fluxes and interactions between different subregions in this area, we find that the southeastern Levantine
area is isolated, with no anticyclone exchanges with the western part of the basin. Moreover the anticyclonic structure above
the Eratosthenes seamount is identified as being an anticyclone attractor, differentiated from other anticyclones and staying
around this preferred position up to four years with successive mergings. Colocalized in situ profiles inside eddies provide
quantitative information on their subsurface structure and show that similar surface signatures correspond to very different
physical properties. Despite interannual variability, the so-called "Eratosthenes attractor" stores a larger amount of heat and
salt than neighboring anticyclones, in a deeper subsurface anomaly that usually extend down to 500 m. This suggests that this
attractor could concentrate heat and salt from this sub-basin, which will impact the properties of intermediate water masses
created there.

How to cite: Barboni, A., Lazar, A., Stegner, A., and Moschos, E.: Lagrangian eddy tracking reveals the Eratosthenes anticyclonicattractor in the eastern Levantine basin, EGU General Assembly 2021, online, 19–30 Apr 2021, EGU21-4290, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu21-4290, 2021.

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