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Summary: Box Modeling of the Eastern Mediterranean Sea
Yosef Ashkenazya,
, Peter Stoneb
, Paola Malanotte-Rizzolib
a
Solar Energy and Environmental Physics, BIDR, Ben-Gurion University, Israel
b
Department of Earth Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139
Abstract
In 1990 a new source of deep water formation in the Eastern Mediterranean
was found in the southern part of the Aegean sea. Till then, the only source of
deep water formation in the Eastern Mediterranean was in the Adriatic sea;
the rate of the deep water formation of the new Aegean source is 1 Sv, three
times larger than the Adriatic source. We develop a simple three box-model
to study the stability of the thermohaline circulation of the Eastern Mediter-
ranean sea. The three boxes represent the Adriatic sea, Aegean sea, and the
Ionian seas. The boxes exchange heat and salinity and may be described by
a set of nonlinear differential equations. We analyze these equations and find
that the system may have one, two, or four stable flux states. We conjecture
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