On the Greenland end of the section the cross-sectional areas in 

 which the temperatures are higher than 4° and 5° show little change 

 from the conditions found in 1951. Eeference to figure 16 however 

 reveals a noticeable, though slight, increase in the values of maximum 

 salmity. The salmity maximum, which was remarkably constant at 

 about 35.047oo durmg the 1930's dropped with the disappearance of 

 the Irmmger Current from this vicinity to 34.97 in 1949 34 99 in 

 1950, 34.96 hi 1951, and in 1952 was 35.01%o. This hints that the 

 Irmmger Current after an almost total absence of 4 years from the 

 Cape Farewell area, may be on the pomt of returnmg to its former 

 values. As has been pomted out in recent bulletins of this series 

 maximum salmities below the normal 35.04 7oo but about 35 00%o 

 may be explamed by postulatbg small dh-ect contributions from the 

 outer margms of the North Atlantic eddy in longitudes immediatelv 

 eastward of Cape Farewell and not dependent upon the recurvatur^ 

 ot the Irmmger Current in the vicinity of Iceland. 



Examhiation of the velocity profile of the West Greenland Current 

 ott Cape Farewell m the summer of 1952 shows a volume transport 

 J .^o^'^„"''^^'''^ ^'^^^^ "^e^ers per second with a mean temperature of ' 

 3./9 C and a heat transport of 22.50 million cubic meter deo-rees 

 centigrade per second. The correspondbg normal values (derived in 

 Bu letin No. 35 of this series) for this time of year are 4.51 4 70 

 and 21.22 whence the volume of flow was 1.42 above normal the 

 mean temperature was 0.91 below normal ^vith the heat transport 

 1.28 above normal. If the West Greenland Current is considered to 

 be made up exclusively of an East Greenland Current component of 

 constant mean temperature of 3.2 and an Irminger Current compo- 

 nent of constant mean temperature 5.5, the observed West Greenland 

 Current can bo broken down into these components with volumes of 

 flow of 4.40 and 1.53 respectively. As the seasonal normal values 

 tor these components are 1.56 and 2.95, the assumed constant mean 

 temperatures lead to the conclusion that the volume of the East 

 Greenland Current component was about three times its normal 

 va ue and the Irminger Current component was about half its normal 

 volume transport. If, however, the West Greenland Current at Cape 

 farewell was not made up exclusively of East Greenland Current and 

 Irmmger Current components, the contribution of the Irminger Cur- 

 rent component would be smaller than this computed volume transport. 

 The cu-culation deduced from the computed values of volume 

 transport, as described above and as given in table 1, is shown sche- 

 matically m figure 17. In this figure the computed volumes have 

 been rounded to the nearest 0.1 million cu.m/sec, and in the cases 

 of the two occupations of the Bonavista triangle they have been 

 adjusted so that the sum of the transports into the triangle equals 

 the sum of the transports out of the triangle. In other words the 



52 



