title: Temporal scales for nearshore hits of current-driven pollution in the Gulf of Finland.
abstract: Lagrangian trajectories of water parcels reconstructed using the TRACMASS model from three-dimensional velocity fields by the RCO model for 1965-2004 are used to analyse the temporal scales and the probability for the hits to the nearshore by pollution originating from a major fairway in the Gulf of Finland and transported by surface currents. Increasing the simulation length from 10 to 20days induces a linear increase in particle age, but the pattern of nearshore hits remains the same. A reasonable benefit can be reached by relatively small shifts of certain parts of the present fairway in a few locations. The overall probabilities do not reveal any trend for 1965-2004. The largest changes in the nearshore hits are revealed for the proportion of hits to the opposite nearshore areas. This feature probably reflects an abrupt turn of the geostrophic air-flow over the southern Baltic Sea by ~40° since 1987.
authors.affiliation: Institute of Cybernetics at Tallinn University of Technology, Akadeemia tee 21, 12618 Tallinn, Estonia. Electronic address: bert@ioc.ee.
authors.forename: Bert
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Viikmäe
authors.affiliation: Institute of Cybernetics at Tallinn University of Technology, Akadeemia tee 21, 12618 Tallinn, Estonia; Estonian Academy of Sciences, Kohtu 6, 10130 Tallinn, Estonia. Electronic address: tarmo.soomere@cs.ioc.ee.
authors.forename: Tarmo
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Soomere
mesh_terms: D001454:Baltic States; D004784:Environmental Monitoring; D004787:Environmental Pollution; D005387:Finland; D008962:Models, Theoretical
keywords: Gulf of Finland; Lagrangian transport; Pollution control; Surface currents