It should be noted that a permanent operational oceanographic system with both monitoring components (observation/modelling) in place has not yet been established

in Croatia. In the last decade there have been some periodic and intensive monitoring programmes with the participation of Croatian institutions, covering the entire area of the Adriatic (ADRICOSM Project (Acta Adriatica 2006); Adriatic Sea Monitoring Programme (Andročec et al. 2009)), or only parts of the Adriatic basin (MAT Project (Science of the Total Environment 2005); the Croatian National Monitoring Programme Dorsomorphin (www.cim.irb.hr/projekti/projekt-jadran/)).

For the purpose of detecting the spread buy Tofacitinib of oil spills within the Adriatic area, the SAR/GIS monitoring system (Morović & Ivanov 2011) is already in place but has not been followed up with numerical model implementation at operational level for forecasting and strategic decision-making. In the early morning hours of 6 February 2008, a Turkish freighter caught fire in the Adriatic Sea 13 nautical miles west of the town of Rovinj (Figure 1). An SOS was sent at 04:04 hrs local time. The 193 m long ship was sailing from Istanbul in Turkey to Trieste in Italy and was carrying 200 trucks and nine tons of hazardous material, in addition to a few hundred tons of ship fuel, causing fears of environmental damage. of As the fire had started inside the ship (Figure 1), there was no way of extinguishing it from the outside. Motivated by this incident, we conducted a numerical analysis with hypothetical scenarios of oil spreading resulting from a 12-hour continuous crude oil spill from a stationary ship at 18.5 kg s− 1, reaching a total amount of 800 tons. Therefore, the present study includes several steps: a) running a numerical

model that defines a three-dimensional unsteady and non-uniform sea current, temperature and salinity fields for the continuous period 1 January–15 November 2008; b) running an oil pollution transport model based on reactive and dispersive processes, also accounting for the intense surface horizontal spreading in the first stage after the oil spill. Analysis of wind data for the position of the ‘Und Adriyatik’ when it failed (Figure 1) during the sea circulation simulation period (1 January–15 November 2008) shows seven situations in which the wind, regardless of its direction, had a speed higher than 7 m s− 1 continuously for 24 hours.