Satellite-tracked drifting buoy data are being collected by numerous investigators and agencies in several countries for the World Ocean Circulation Experiment-Tropical Oceans Global Atmosphere (WOCE-TOGA) Surface Velocity Program. By the end of the century, and thereafter, this global dataset will provide the best available climatology and chronology of the surface currents of the World Ocean. To expedite completion of research quality datasets for archival and dissemination, a data acquisition activity is being conducted at NOAA Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory (AOML), Miami, Florida. At AOML, data from drifting buoys of cooperating operators are quality controlled and optimally interpolated to uniform 6-h interval trajectories for archival at the Marine Environmental Data Service (Canada). This report describes in detail the procedures used in preparing these data for the benefit of second- or third-party users, or future buoy operators who may wish to process data in a con... Abstract Satellite-tracked drifting buoy data are being collected by numerous investigators and agencies in several countries for the World Ocean Circulation Experiment-Tropical Oceans Global Atmosphere (WOCE-TOGA) Surface Velocity Program. By the end of the century, and thereafter, this global dataset will provide the best available climatology and chronology of the surface currents of the World Ocean. To expedite completion of research quality datasets for archival and dissemination, a data acquisition activity is being conducted at NOAA Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory (AOML), Miami, Florida. At AOML, data from drifting buoys of cooperating operators are quality controlled and optimally interpolated to uniform 6-h interval trajectories for archival at the Marine Environmental Data Service (Canada). This report describes in detail the procedures used in preparing these data for the benefit of second- or third-party users, or future buoy operators who may wish to process data in a con...

This paper is the outcome of a workshop held in Rome in November 2011 on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the POEM (Physical Oceanography of the Eastern Mediterranean) program. In the workshop discussions, a number of unresolved issues were identified for the physical and biogeochemical properties of the Mediterranean Sea as a whole, i.e., comprising the Western and Eastern sub-basins. Over the successive two years, the related ideas were discussed among the group of scientists who participated in the workshop and who have contributed to the writing of this paper. Three major topics were identified, each of them being the object of a section divided into a number of different sub-sections, each addressing a specific physical, chemical or biological issue: 1. Assessment of basin-wide physical/biochemical properties, of their variability and interactions. 2. Relative importance of external forcing functions (wind stress, heat/moisture fluxes, forcing through straits) vs. internal variability. 3. Shelf/deep sea interactions and exchanges of physical/biogeochemical properties and how they affect the sub-basin circulation and property distribution. Furthermore, a number of unresolved scientific/methodological issues were also identified and are reported in each sub-section after a short discussion of the present knowledge. They represent the collegial consensus of the scientists contributing to the paper. Naturally, the unresolved issues presented here constitute the choice of the authors and therefore they may not be exhaustive and/or complete. The overall goal is to stimulate a broader interdisciplinary discussion among the scientists of the Mediterranean oceanographic community, leading to enhanced collaborative efforts and exciting future discoveries.

Drifter observations and satellite-derived sea surface height data are used to quantitatively study the surface geostrophic circulation of the entire Mediterranean Sea for the period spanning 1992–2010. After removal of the wind-driven components from the drifter velocities and low-pass filtering in bins of 1° × 1° × 1 week, maps of surface geostrophic circulation (mean flow and kinetic energy levels) are produced using the drifter and/or satellite data. The mean currents and kinetic energy levels derived from the drifter data appear stronger/higher with respect to those obtained from satellite altimeter data. The maps of mean circulation estimated from the drifter data and from a combination of drifter and altimeter data are, however, qualitatively similar. In the western basin they show the main pathways of the surface waters flowing eastward from the Strait of Gibraltar to the Sicily Channel and the current transporting waters back westward along the Italian, French, and Spanish coasts. Intermittent and long-lived subbasin-scale eddies and gyres abound in the Tyrrhenian and Algerian Seas. In the eastern basin, the surface waters are transported eastward by several currents but recirculate in numerous eddies and gyres before reaching the northward coastal current off Israel, Lebanon, and Syria and veering westward off Turkey. In the Ionian Sea, the mean geostrophic velocity maps were also produced separately for the two extended seasons and for multiyear periods. Significant variations are confirmed, with seasonal reversals of the currents in the south and changes of the circulation from anticyclonic (prior to 1 July 2007) to cyclonic and back to anticyclonic after 31 December 2005.