Figure 1. The area representative of the Gulf of Lions DWF used in this study is surrounded by the red line. The ocean model bathymetry (in m) over the NWMed is also shown.
As representative of the GoL we use the mixed patch area surrounded by the red line in Figure 1. Somot et al., (2018) have verified that their results are not very sensitive to the choice of the GoL domain if the continental shelf is avoided and the region where open-sea deep convection occurs is included. The selection of the DWF target area was performed using the mean winter MLD for the 1976–2005 period. The mixed patch area is composed by the grid points where the mean winter MLD is deeper than 1000 m, which corresponds to the depth of WMDW prior to the convection (Waldman et al. 2017).