Fig.11. Temporal variation of the highest salinity value found in the section (PN line) crossing the Kuroshio northwest of Okinawa (Saeki, personal communication).
6. Concluding Remarks
It is shown that the frequency of the saline water higher than 34.95 is considerably lower than salinities of lower than 34.90 in the region to the south of the Kii Peninsula：the occurrence frequency of the saline water higher than 34.95 is about 2.5%, and that higher than 35.00 about 0.6%. However, these frequency is statistically significant enough to conclude that the abnormally saline water higher than 35.00 is brought into the region sporadically.
The source region of the abnormally saline water and the route along which the water have been brought into the area has not been clarified. In order to find these, we are trying to expand the area of analysis to the whole western North Pacific. However, the analysis of extreme values such as the abnormally saline water discussed here is severely influenced by the quality of the data. Careful evaluation of the data quality is needed in the further investigations.
Acknowledgements
We thank for Prof. Takashi Koike of the Mie University for his advice and encouragement throughout this investigation. Our thanks are also due to the staff of the Japan Oceanographic Data Center for offering the necessary data for us in convenient form. This work was partially supported by Grant-in-Aid defrayed by the Ministry of Education, Science, Sports, and Culture of Japan (07454111).
References
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Takeuchi, J. (1985)： High salinity water found off the Kii Peninsula in the summer of 1984. Bull. Japan Soc. Fish. Oceanogr., 47/48, 193-195 (in Japanese).
