Identification of the environmentally safe fairway in the South-Western Baltic Sea and Kattegat

Abstract

Application of the preventive techniques for the optimisation of fairways in the south-western Baltic Sea and the Kattegat in terms of protection of the coastal regions against current-driven surface transport of adverse impacts released from vessels is considered. The techniques rely on the quantification of the offshore domains (the points of release of adverse impacts) in terms of their ability to serve as a source of remote, current-driven danger to the nearshore. An approximate solution to this inverse problem of current-driven transport is obtained using statistical analysis of a large pool of Lagrangian trajectories of water particles calculated based on velocity fields from the Denmark's Meteorological Institute (DMI)/BSH cmod circulation model forced by the DMI-HIRHAM wind fields for 1990-1994. The optimum fairways are identified from the spatial distributions of the probability of hitting the coast and for the time (particle age) it takes for the pollution to reach the coast. In general, the northern side of the Darss Sill area and the western domains of the Kattegat are safer to travel. The largest variations in the patterns of safe areas and the properties of pollution beaching occur owing to the interplay of water inflow and outflow. The gain from the use of the optimum fairways is in the range of 10-30 % in terms of the decrease in the probability of coastal hit within 10 days after pollution release or an increase by about 1-2 days of the time it takes for the hit to occur.

Current status of deepwater oil spill modelling in the Faroe-Shetland Channel, Northeast Atlantic, and future challenges

“…Although tanker incidents represent a much more prevalent, albeit declining, global source of oil spills (between 47-75% by volume in 1970-1999, against 10-23% in the same period; Burgherr (2007)), shipping (including tanker) traffic density in our area is low and generally absent of large tankers (MMO, 2014). In that sense, our circumstances are very different from those of enclosed basins such as the Baltic Sea and the Eastern Mediterranean Sea, where heavy tanker traffic and their proximity to the coastline increase the relative likelihood of oil spills due to shipping incidents and where the chance of oil reaching large sections of the coast in short timescales (Lu et al, 2012;Alves et al, 2014Alves et al, , 2015 is higher.…”

The Potential of Current- and Wind-Driven Transport for Environmental Management of the Baltic Sea

“…An analogous scheme, with no nesting for the Gulf of Finland, was used in Lu et al (2012). The RCO and BSIOM models were applied to the entire interior of the Baltic Sea.…”

“…Four different circulation models were used to simulate currents in the Baltic Sea and its sub-basins. The DMI/BSH cmod (Kleine 1994 ; Dick et al 2001 ) was applied to the southern Baltic Sea (Lu et al 2012 ). Its further development, the HIROMB-BOOS community (HBM) model, was used to calculate oil drift and fate in the Gulf of Finland (Murawski and Woge Nielsen 2013 ).…”

“…A finer model of the transition area between these seas (incl. the south-western Baltic Sea) with a horizontal resolution of 0.5 nautical miles was two-way nested into the above 3-mile model (Lu et al 2012 ; Murawski and Woge Nielsen 2013 ). Another finer 0.5-mile model was applied for the Gulf of Finland (Murawski and Woge Nielsen 2013 ).…”

Oil spill hazard assessment using a reverse trajectory method for the Egadi marine protected area (Central Mediterranean Sea)

“…Lagrangian trajectories have been used to investigate the drift pattern induced by currents in the Baltic Sea and in the Gulf of Finland with the aim of identifying safe routes, in order to minimize the probability of coastal pollution and/or to maximize the time before which adverse effects are seen at the coast (Soomere et al, 2010;Lu et al, 2012;Soomere et al, 2014). More specific to oil pollution, trajectory analysis has been used to investigate the risk posed by oil-dumping from ships along the German North Sea coast (Chrastansky and Callies, 2009), in the Gulf of Finland (Murawski and Woge Nielsen, 2013) and in the Strait of Bonifacio in the Mediterranean Sea (Olita et al, 2012) during reconstructions of atmospheric winds and marine currents spanning several years.…”