The long-term goal of this project is to improve understanding and predictability of the regional circulation in the western North Pacific. The objective of this project is to characterize variability in the Kuroshio east of Taiwan and to understand (1) how this variability is related to variability in the upstream region, where the North Equatorial Current bifurcates forming the northward-flowing Kuroshio and the southward-flowing Mindanao Current and (2) how westward-propagating mesoscale eddies that arrive east of Taiwan from the ocean interior affect Kuroshio variability. This will establish the advective versus the eddy-driven contributions to Kuroshio variability east of Taiwan. To determine the time-varying Kuroshio transport and velocity structure east of Taiwan, in situ measurements will be collected with moorings deployed across the Kuroshio for at least 1 year. This work is being carried out in collaboration with Dr. Jan Sen from the National Taiwan University (NTU), whose companion project is funded by the Taiwanese National Science Council. The field work will be carried out along the 200-km long KTV1-line at the Yaeyama Ridge (Figure 1). The Yaeyama Ridge is about 100 km south of the Ilan Ridge, which separates the Philippine Basin from the East China Sea. The field experiment will include shipboard and time series measurements. The deployment cruise is scheduled for November 2012 on the Taiwanese research vessel OR-1.
