Water Exchange through Canal Istanbul and Bosphorus Strait

Abstract

The Turkish Straits System (TSS) regulates the transports of water, material and energy between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean Sea. Amidst existing environmental threats to the region surrounding I.stanbul, the environmental footprint of the proposed Canal I.stanbul project needs to be evaluated through methods of natural science. We take the elementary step to answer the particular problem of coupled strait dynamics by adding the Canal to an existing hydrodynamic model and estimate changes in their common response. Compared to the virtually unmodified exchange flow in the Bosphorus, the flow in the Canal has a weak lower layer current component, contrasted with intense currents at the exit controls at its junction with the Marmara Sea. The upper and lower layer transports through this simplest hypothetical TSS configuration are slightly increased for a given net barotropic flow across the system. The modified regime is expected to have climatological consequences.