Kuroshio

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The Pacific counterpart of the Gulf Stream: the western boundary current of the North Pacific subtropical gyre, running north along the east coast of Taiwan, up the shelf edge of the East China Sea and past Japan before turning east as the Kuroshio Extension. The WOCE PCM-1 moored array east of Taiwan measured a mean transport of about 21.5 ± 2.5 Sv; across the PN line in the central East China Sea the time-mean is about 23.3 Sv. Transport varies by roughly ±10 Sv on timescales of months, with most observations showing a maximum in the warm half of the year. Its name means "black tide" — the water is unusually clear and nutrient-poor, and therefore dark.