ACP Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics ACP 1680-7324 Copernicus GmbH Göttingen, Germany 10.5194/acp-10-5089-2010 Origin and transport of Mediterranean moisture and air Schicker I. 1 Radanovics S. 1 Seibert P. 1 Institute of Meteorology, University of Natural Resources and Applied Life Sciences, Vienna, Austria 08 06 2010 10 11 5089 5105 This is an open-access article ditributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. This article is available from http://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/10/5089/2010/acp-10-5089-2010.html The full text article is available as a PDF file from http://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/10/5089/2010/acp-10-5089-2010.pdf

Considering the Mediterranean as a region of high evaporation and low precipitation, evaluations of sinks and sources of moisture and precipitation in the Mediterranean basin have been carried out within the frame of the CIRCE (Climate Change and Impact Research: the Mediterranean Environment) project. Besides these evaluations, residence time and stagnation/ventilation analyses have been carried out to investigate transport to and from the Mediterranean basin and in the basin itself. A Lagrangian moisture diagnosis method calculating budgets of evaporation minus precipitation was applied to a 5.5 year (October 1999–April 2005) trajectory data set and evaluated for eight representative Mediterranean Regions Of Interest (ROI). The Mediterranean basin has been identified as a major source of moisture and precipitation to the surrounding land area and to the basin itself. Main regions of stagnation, i.e. the Po basin, have been defined on a seasonal basis through residence time analysis. Evaluation of the transport to and from the basin shows that the Mediterranean is a crossroad of airstreams where air enters mainly from the northwest and continues in two separate streams, one going southwest over North Africa into the trade wind zone and the other one to the northeast through Central Asia.

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