engleski

Dense water formation in the eastern coastal Adriatic during an extreme cooling event

Dense water formation (DWF) that occurred in both open and coastal waters of the Adriatic Sea during extreme cooling event in January/February 2012 was reproduced by coupled high-resolution atmosphere-ocean modelling system. Regional Ocean Modeling System (ROMS) ocean model has been applied with resolution of 2 km and with lateral boundaries coming from the operational AREG Adriatic model. The model has been forced at the sea surface by the operational NWP model ALADIN/HR, providing winds at 2 km spatial resolution via dynamical adaptation technique every 3 hours, while other bulk variables were computed at 8 km resolution and used every 3 hours. Two model experiments were conducted (simulations starting in 2008): the first with real river fluxes in January 2011 – July 2012 period, for Po River, all available Croatian rivers and power-plants outflows and recently compiled Slovenian river data, together with mean year daily fluxes for other Adriatic rivers. The second experiment used climatological perpetual river fluxes computed from all available hydrological data throughout the model run. Eastern Adriatic coastal river fluxes turned out to have a dramatically lower both perpetual and real freshwater fluxes compared to traditionally used climatological river fluxes documented by Raicich (1994) and mostly used in previous Adriatic modelling studies

dense water; Adriatic; cold air outbreak

nije evidentirano