They observed high salinity water exceeding 35.0 psu only once (August 2, 1984) in their observation history starting from 1963. We analyzed all data in the region which have been archived by JODC for the period from 1975 to 1996 (the data of WRCAFF had not archived in JODC database at the time of this analysis of Morikawa et al., 1997), and found 12 observation points where the salinity value higher than 35.0 were observed. Especially, R/V Soyo-maru of the Tokai Regional Fisheries Research Laboratory, JFA observed such high salinity water at 4 stations on August 1-2, 1984. So, we conclude that such high salinity value is real one though its occurrence frequency is very low. We divided the region into 26 sub-regions as shown in Fig.7, and analyzed occurrence frequencies of high salinity water. Salinity values from 34.70 through 35.0 at interval of 0.05 were selected as reference salinity values. The occurrence frequency of observations where salinity higher than each of these selected values was computed for each sub-region.
