3. Regional water circulation
The Bay of Biscay is part of the Atlantic Ocean, and is limited by the northern and western coasts of Spain and France respectively, extending over approximately 250,000 km2.
Following the Prestige event, important efforts have been directed, by marine research institutes, to analyse the effects on the ecosystem; this, in turn, is related to the high economical importance of the fisheries sector in the Bay of Biscay.
Thus, numerous studies have been undertaken in recent years, involving physical aspects of the oceanography, such as: hydrological sampling; current meter and drifter deployments; air and sea surface temperature measurements; satellite
data analysis; and numerical modelling