| Summary: | As the salty and dense Mediteranean overflow exits the Strait of Gibraltar and descends rapidly in the Gulf of Cadiz, it entrains the fresher overlying subtropical Atlantic Water. A minimal model is put forth in this study to show that the entrainment process associated with the Mediterranean outflow in the Gulf of Cadiz can impact the upper ocean circulation in the subtropical North Atlantic Ocean and can be a fundamental factor in the establishment of the Azores Current. Two key simplifications are applied in the interest of producing an economical model that captures the dominant effects. The first is to recognize that in a vertically-asymmetric two layer system, a relatively shallow upper layer can be dynamically approximated as a single-layer reduced-gravity controlled barotropic system, and the second is to apply quasigeostrophic dynamics such that the volume flux divergence effect associated with the entrainment is represented as a source of potential vorticity. Two sets of com.
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