CMCC Talks
14 May 2025, 15:00 CEST
To join the webinar, register here

Speaker: 
Erik van Sebille, Professor at Utrecht University, NL

Moderator: 
Simona Masina, CMCC 

Abstract
The world’s ocean currents can transport material like plastic over vast scales, from local to global. The most natural way to study these transport pathways and the connections between ocean basins is by using trajectories, computed by simulating virtual Lagrangian particles in fine-resolution ocean models. In this seminar, an overview of some recent work with Lagrangian particle analysis will be given. The open-source oceanparcels.org framework will be introduced it will be shown how this framework is used to simulate the transport of micro- and macro-plastic, in order to map the global 3-dimensional distribution of plastic in our ocean. The use of these maps to compute ecological risk will be shown, by overlapping the maps with biodiversity hotspots. The developement of new parameterizations for subgrid-scale transport processes of floating plastic items will be discussed, as well as the comparison of these parameterizations to field and lab measurements. The inference of possible plastic sources using a Bayesian framework will be discussed.