BalticWay

 

The potential of currents for environmental management of the Baltic Sea maritime industry

UPDATE - BALTICWAY briefing on key results, published 24 October 2011

Begin date 1.1.2009

End date 31.12.2011

Grant: 1685 656€

The project aims at a substantial decrease of marine-industry-induced environmental risks and impacts on bio-diversity, particularly on fragile ecosystems. The core objective is to develop a scientific platform for an innovative low-cost technology of environmental management of shipping, offshore, and coastal engineering activities. The technology will be applied to place dangerous activities in areas, an accident in which will have a minimum threat to vulnerable areas.

Our approach makes use of the existence of semi-persistent current patterns that considerably affect the properties of pollution propagation: the probability of transport of dangerous substances from different open sea areas to the vulnerable areas is largely different. For certain regions (areas of reduced risk) this probability is relatively small.

The location of areas of reduced risk will be established numerically and verified experimentally. A combination of the classical risk analysis with novel mathematical methods (such as inverse methods) will be applied to identify the persistence, properties, and potential effect of such areas, and to establish generic criteria for their existence. Based on existing results, we concentrate on the Gulf of Finland and the Darss Sill.

As a first step we consider the consequences of current-induced propagation of oil spills released from ships, aiming to route ships along the least dangerous paths, much like dangerous transports on land follow predefined routes.

Keywords

Environmental management, numerical simulations, risk analysis, currents, oil spill propagation

 

List of Participants and Principal Scientists

Institute of Cybernetics at Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia		Tarmo Soomere  (Coordinator)
Finnish Environment Institute, Finland		Kai Myrberg
Department of Meteorology, Stockholm University, Sweden		Kristofer Döös
Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute, Sweden		Markus Meier
Danish Meteorological Institute, Denmark		Jun She
GKSS Research Center Geesthacht, Germany		Emil Stanev
Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at the University of Kiel, Germany		Andreas Lehmann
Laser Diagnostic Instruments Ltd, Estonia		Sergey Babichenko

 

Reports

Year 1 progress report
Year 2 progress report

Please visit the BalticWay webpage for more information!