Barsakelmes Island

The Aral Sea coast is characterized by very scanty atmospheric precipitation. The Atlantic air masses, being the main humidifying factor, become desiccated while moving inside the continent or they fail to reach the Aral Sea at all. The sum of precipitation over the Aral Sea is less compared to the coast which is seen in Fig. 6, on Barsakelmes island less precipitation occurs then at coastal hydrometeorological stations. 

The notion of the predesiccation Aral Sea circulation is somewhat speculative, given that extremely few (if any) direct current measurements have been reported. However, already the early researchers [7, 8] perceived the most peculiar feature of the sea s basin-scale circulation, namely, its anticyclonic direction (although there was also a hint of a smaller cyclonic gyre north of Barsakelmes Island [4, 9]). As is well known, the neighboring enclosed seas lying in the same latitude belt, such as the Black Sea, the Sea of Azov, and the Caspian Sea, all exhibit cyclonic... 

Fig. 7 Zonal vertical distribution of salinity upper panel) and temperature lower panel) across the northern part of the eastern basin, from the eastern outlet of the strait connecting the two basins to the western extremity of the former Barsakelmes Island. October, 2005, Survey 5(3)...

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