FIGURE 19. The woke system in the meeting of the Kuroshio ond 

 Oyashio off Jopon finds worm, highly saline water from the south 

 meeting cold, dilute water from the north. In the top drawing, the 

 temperature pottern is traced. Note that directly off the northern 

 coast of Honshu, the chief island of Jopon, the woter temperature at 

 depth of 600 feet rises obout 16 F in about 100 miles Measure 

 ments were mode in July through September, 1961. In the lower figure 

 is a theoreticol analysis of the double woke — or vortex street — system. 



wake .system he had discovered off the island of Hawaii had 

 a larger counterpart in the western Pacific. 



The meeting of the Kuroshio and Oyashio, the great warm 

 and cold currents that join off the coast of Japan, is one of 

 the most interesting features of the Pacific Ocean. It is a 

 boundary where the warm, saline waters of the south meet 

 the cold, dilute waters of the north, and the site of major 

 ocean fisheries. 



Barkley's studies of the wake system downstream from 

 Hawaii have yielded a clue which promises to bring order 

 out of the apparent chaos of the front between the Kuroshio 

 and the Oyashio. For there, too. he finds a wake system 

 (fig. 19), but one wider and much more complex than that 

 off the island of Hawaii. The wake off Japan differs from 

 that off Hawaii in at least three respects: It consists of not 

 one, but two von Karman-type systems, side by side; it is 

 considerably more intense, with much larger eddies; and 

 it appears to remain stationary instead of moving down- 

 stream. There is one other difference, too. The area west 

 of Hawaii has been fished too little to show definitely if the 

 wake has an effect upon the abundance of commercially 

 important fish. Off Japan, Barkley believes that the much 

 stronger gradients of the Kuroshio-Oyashio system influence 

 the fisheries. 



"The discovery that the Kuroshio-Oyashio front is a rather 

 well-ordered system may have important implications to the 

 men who fish the Gulf Stream and in other areas where it 

 is possible that von Karman wake phenomena may be found, 

 now that we know what to look for," Barkley says. 



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