Results from a recent hydrographic survey show that an influx of Aegean Sea water has replaced 20 percent of the deep and bottom waters of the eastern Mediterranean. Previously, the only source of such waters was the Adriatic Sea, and the waters of the eastern Mediterranean were in near-steady state. The flux changed the water characteristics and displaced older waters upward. Its cause was increasing Aegean Sea salinity, resulting from changes in either the circulation pattern or the large-scale freshwater balance. Current deepwater studies may be affected by the intrusion, but effects might be found also at shallower depths and over a larger region.

Abstract. Using a sampling grid of 67 stations, the influence of basin-wide and subbasrascale circulation features on phytoplankton community composition and primary and new productions-was investigated m the eastern Mediterranean during winter. Taxonomic pigments were used as size class markers of phototroph groups (picophytoplankton, nanophytoplankton and microphytoplankton). Primary production rates-were computed using a light photosynthesis model that makes use of the total chlorophyll a (Tchl a) concentration profile as an input variable. New production was estimated as the product of primary production by a pigment-based proxy of thef ratio (new production/total production).

Reconstructions of Mediterranean ocean temperature fields back to 1950 show a proxy relationship between heat content changes in the North Atlantic and the Western Mediterranean Deep Water (WMDW) formed in the Gulf of Lions in winter, because of consistent air‐sea heat fluxes over these areas, strongly correlated to the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO).

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