Anthropogenic hydrocarbons and plastic debris modelling in the Mediterranean Sea

Giovanni Coppini, Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change, Lecce, Italy, Svitlana Liubartseva, Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change, Bologna, Italy, Rita Lecci, Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change, Italy, Sergio Cretí, Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change, Ocean Predictions and Applications, Italy and Nadia Pinardi, Centro Euro-Mediterraneo sui Cambiamenti Climatici, Italy, Italy; University of Bologna, Physics and Astronomy, Bologna, Italy
Abstract:
Pathways and fate of the oil and marine plastic in the Mediterranean have been studying by means of Lagrangian particle tracking models.

Progress in the modelling of oil drift by means of the MEDSLIK-II oil spill community model (www.medslik-ii.org) is demonstrated by the latest applications and development that include (1) running the model in both deterministic and stochastic mode under a great variety of oil drift forcings; (2) validation with observational data during the real oil spill cases; (3) the downscaling methodology that allows an accurate representation of coastal scales; and (4) an innovative fully operational 24/7 web-based decision support system WITOIL supported by comprehensive computational resources and network bandwidth.

A two-dimensional Lagrangian framework, called NEED (mariNE littEr moDel), is established by CMCC to track the transport and fate of floating plastic debris in the Mediterranean, embracing its three environmental compartments: the sea surface, coastlines, and the sea bottom. The model is capable to track marine litter originated from terrestrial and maritime route inputs. A statistically significant ensemble of virtual particles is released from the largest coastal Mediterranean cities, rivers, and the most congested shipping lanes. Transport of plastics is forced by the high-resolution data provided by the CMEMS operational oceanography framework. The Monte Carlo technique developed for the beaching and sedimentation of plastic debris allows a simple approximation with a small number of parameters.

To meet practical needs, we divide the basin into the subregions of interest; calculate the relative contribution of the floating debris inputs from each source-subregion solving the direct problem; for each receptor-subregion, we calculate the relative contribution from the source-subregion solving the inverse problem. Finally, we summarize the results in terms of direct and inverse impact matrices.

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