All this is part of the Mediterranean, a few rivers coming into it,
the Rhone is the main one, the Po, with the water coming from the Alps.
But it's not enough to correct all the evaporation that's going on.
As you see, here we've got north of Africa is all pretty hot, especially in summer,
lot of [INAUDIBLE] evaporation going on making the Mediterranean a very salty sea.
And the ocean, the ocean which is out here tries to correct that, we'll talk about it
later on but we'll see it has some major implications from currents.
The other thing is important to realize is that it's land-locked,
and weather gets a lot more complicated once land gets involved.
In the middle of the ocean,
weather forecasting is a lot easier than being close to the shore.
Okay, so the race starts from Barcelona.
Right here in Spain, Catalonia.
Protected by the Pyrenees, big mountain ridge over here.
And protected by the whole of Spain.
You could see here on the map, that's any green surface here in Galicia,
France, but once we get into Spain, it gets drier and drier as we go east, and
we're protected from the Atlantic weather.
[INAUDIBLE] first part of the course.
We go from Barcelona to the Straits of Gibraltar, it's the only way out.
And you can see that the course will change quite often.
Here, here, here, Cabo de Gata, and then on to Gibraltar.
A few islands in the way, which could become an obstacle or
they could be an opportunity, and always the choice here, are we going for
the winds offshore, the gradient winds, thinking that there's no lands,
or do we go for local effects, the sea breezes during the day?
As the land heats up, it gives a sea-breeze onto
the coast that only extends ten maybe fifteen miles.
Land breezes in the night, even smaller distance.
As the land cools down,
the air starts gliding down, katabatic winds they call it.
But normally you have to be right into the beach to get that.
Okay, and then eventually we end up here in the Alboran Sea.
Here it becomes different in that the Straight of Gibraltar
is massive Venturi effect, right?
Any easterly wind gets strongly accelerated,
any westerly wind gets strongly accelerated.
Inside the strait, northerly or
southerly winds are extremely, extremely rare if not impossible.
It always gets channeled by the strait and accelerated.
This is a site here from Gibraltar Strait.
Gibraltar itself is over here.
We then go down, well, down west to the coast,
you can see these mountain ranges over here.
The Spanish mainlands.
If I go back a little bit, Gibraltar over there.
Go over to the other side, we'll end up in Morocco.