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Springer Proceedings in Earth and Environmental Sciences

ISSN:2524342

2022

10.1007/978-3-030-99504-1_14

The aim of the presented study is to investigate one remarkable feature of the Black Sea deep-water circulation. These are unsteady narrow anticyclonic currents that propagate under the main pycnocline in the direction opposite to the surface circulation and are called undercurrents. According to observation data, undercurrents were discovered in several field expeditions, and were also revealed in some results of the Black Sea dynamic modeling. However, due to the lack of regular observations, it was not entirely clear whether they were a real feature of the Black Sea current field or an artifact of the experiments carried out. In this work, to assess the spatial variability of the Black Sea current field and identify undercurrents, the results of modeling the Black Sea circulation for several periods were analyzed. Simulations were carried out using the MHI model, and the results were validated based on deep-water field observation data on temperature and salinity. As well, in the northeastern part of the sea the simulated currents were compared with the data of ADCP deep-water velocity measurements (with Aqualog profiler). It is shown that undercurrents are more often formed in the spring–summer period and their lifetime is from one to several weeks. And although the length of undercurrents along the continental slope can reach several hundred kilometers, their width is only 8–12 km. Such characteristics of undercurrents explain the difficulty of their detection and identification in previous works. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Black Sea, Deep-water circulation, Numerical experiment, Observations, Simulation, Undercurrents

2022-05-24 14:16:33