Levantine Intermediate Water characteristics: an astounding general misunderstanding! (addendum)

Abstract

Discussions following the publication of “Levantine Intermediate Water characteristics: an astounding general misunderstanding!” (Millot 2013a) confirmed that this warm salty (similar results with cool fresh) intermediate water was generally thought to be characterized, even after significant mixing, by a homogeneous core (i.e. a dσ/dz minimum) while we think it could be characterized by a dσ/dz maximum. Additional computations specify our feelings and suggest that only such a hypothetical dσ/dz maximum can provide information about the characteristics of these intermediate waters, in this case only the local immersion of the core, since the associated s depends essentially on the σ values of all the surrounding waters encountered upstream, while the Θ and S maxima evolve continuously. Because we are convinced that such studies have a global importance and deserve much more interest than they have received up to now, we hope that these additional computations and data analyses will motivate really theoretical studies that could be easily checked with a consequent data set available all over the Mediterranean Sea in particular.