Observations of recurrent mesoscale eddies in the eastern Mediterranean

A Mediterranean Sea observation program, conducted in the early 1990s by the Naval Oceanographic Office, included temperature aerial surveys, the deployment of satellite‐tracked drifting buoys, and the real‐time analysis of satellite infrared imagery. Over 4 years of weekly front and eddy analyses generated from the satellite imagery and over 100 drifting buoy trajectories were examined here for recurrent eddies in the eastern Mediterranean. Five recurrent mesoscale eddies found in the satellite imagery remained relatively stationary with the standard deviation of the eddy center locations comparable to the mean eddy diameter. Three of the recurrent eddies were seeded with satellite‐tracked drifting buoys. One buoy circulated within each of two anticyclones for several weeks, allowing application of a kinematic feature model to the buoy trajectories for the extraction of propagation and circulation characteristics. The Ierapetra anticyclone remained southwest of the mean satellite‐derived center, rotating slowly clockwise about 1.2° d −1 with a swirl velocity that increased linearly with distance from the center nearly to its outer edge. The Pelops anticyclone exhibited a slight westward propagation tendency, its major axis rotated clockwise about 4° d −1 , and the swirl velocity had a broad maximum well inside the eddy that was nearly independent of radius. Inertial waves were observed in two of the buoy trajectories, with the differences in the observed inertial periods consistent with the effects of eddy circulation on near‐inertial waves.