Circulación del Golfo de México

The Gulf 0f Mexico constitutes a natural resource of immense ecological and economic importance foe Mexico and the World (Vidal, el al., 1997). Our capacity to exploitit rationallydepends on our knowledge of its nature, fundamentally of its circulation system, amongst others. In this article wepresent a review of our knowledge of the Gulf of Mexico circulation, generated fundamentally by in-situobservations and numerical modelling during the last 20 years. We emphasize the importanceof anticyclonic vortices, with diameters of up to 600 km, shed by the Loop Current. that migrate toward the interior of the Gulf until they collide against the western shelf break, in the generation of geostrophic turbulence, the Western Boundary Current on the western margin, jet currents with speeds of 32 lo 85 cm s-1, intense upwelling of up to 15 m day-1, and the mechanism by which 30 x106 m3 s-1of Subtropical Underwater (SUW), from the Caribbean Sea, are transformed into Gulf Common Water. The quality of the numerical experiments is analyzed in the light of thein-situ observations, and we conclude that the lack of a great quantity of truthfull oceanographic and meteorological data, needed to accurately and precisely define the initial and boundary conditions of the simulations, continues to be the most serious problem in the conduct of reliable model validation and verification studies. Finally because of its basic and applied scientific importance, wepresent an updated discussion of theorigen and formation mechanism of the Western Boundary Current, observed and simulated, parallel to the western continental shelf break of the Gulf of Mexico. We conclude that the Western Boundary Current in the western region of the Gulf of Mexico could well be principally generated by the collision of anticyclonic vortices, shed from the Loop Current against the western continental shelf break