Abstract
A method to evaluate aquatic mortality given a pollutant distribution is presented and applied to several sample low pH plumes representing various ocean CO2 disposal schemes. The method is an improvement over current analysis because it integrates the mortality due to time‐varying exposure to low pH with the probabilistic experiences of passive organisms subject to turbulent lateral diffusion as they pass through the plume. For the examples presented, the plume was discretized laterally into lanes and longitudinally by time steps, and a random walk model accounting for the scale‐dependent nature of relative diffusion was used to simulate the organism pathways over one time step. From these simulations, the probability that an organism will be in a given lane, \(\dot \jmath \), one time step after it starts from an initial lane, \(i\), was determined for all combinations of \(i\) and \(\dot \jmath \) . These probabilities were used to find the number of organisms following each of the possible pathways, and the mortality to the organisms due to their time varying exposure to low pH was determined by using the toxicity model described in part I of this paper. The integrated method allows the impact of the plume to be described in terms of total organism mortality as well as spatial deficit of organisms.
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Caulfield, J.A., Adams, E.E., Auerbach, D.I. et al. Impacts of ocean CO2 disposal on marine life: II. Probabilistic plume exposure model used with a time‐varying dose‐response analysis. Environmental Modeling & Assessment 2, 345–353 (1997). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1019081915826
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1019081915826