《A Study of Transport and Impact Strength of Fukushima Nuclear Pollutants in the North Pacific Surface》.pdfVIP

J. Ocean Univ. China (Oceanic and Coastal Sea Research) DOI 10.1007/s11802-014-1942-9 ISSN 1672-5182, 2014 13 (2): 183-190 /xbywb/ E-mail:xbywb@ A Study of Transport and Impact Strength of Fukushima Nuclear Pollutants in the North Pacific Surface * FU Hongli, LI Wei, ZHANG Xuefeng, HAN Guijun , WANG Xidong, WU Xinrong, and ZHANG Lianxin Key Laboratory of Marine Environmental Information Technology, State Oceanic Administration, National Marine Data and Information Service, Tianjin 300171, P. R. China (Received February 27, 2012; revised July 23, 2012; accepted May 30, 2013) © Ocean University of China, Science Press and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014 Abstract Based on the statistics of surface drifter data of 1979–2011 and the simulation of nuclear pollutant particulate move- ments simulated using high quality ocean reanalysis surface current dataset, the transport pathways and impact strength of Fuku- shima nuclear pollutants in the North Pacific have been estimated. The particulates are used to increase the sampling size and en- hance the representativeness of statistical results. The trajectories of the drifters and particulates are first examined to identify typical drifting pathways. The results show that there are three types of transport paths for nuclear pollutants at the surface: 1) most pollutant particles move eastward and are carried by the Kuroshio and Kuroshio-extension currents and reach the east side of the North Pacific after about 3.2–3.9 years; 2) some particles travel with the subtropical circulation branch and reach the east coast of China after about 1.6 years according to one drifter trajectory and about 3.6 years according to particulate trajectories; 3) a little of them travel with local, small scale circulations and reach the east coast of China after about 1.3–1.8 years. Based on the par- tic