The mid-mediterranean jet artefact

Abstract

The Mid-Mediterranean Jet has been considered to be, since the 1990s, a more or less continuous surface current meandering across most of the eastern basin of the Mediterranean Sea, generating a series of eddies. This relatively recent view of the current, which was not found in earlier circulation diagrams and does not have any theoretical support, emerges more or less from simple statistics applied to any kind of in situ data. Here we use a relatively large set of surface drifter trajectories, which provide reasonable sampling of the area of interest, to show how mesoscale anticyclonic eddies generated elsewhere with specific diameters, locations and displacements, can provide a misleading picture by suggesting the occurrence of a mid basin jet which is actually nothing more than a data analysis artefact. Copyright 2010 by the American Geophysical Union.