Predicting natural disasters in the coastal zone based on links between land and marine ecosystems

Natural disasters in the marine and coastal zone such as hypoxia, hydrosulphuric infection, eutrophication and pollution of sea water with industrial and household waste produce an unhealthy water environment. This affects fisheries, tourism, recreation, aquaculture and population health. Control of unhealthy conditions and their consequences for human activities in the coastal zone is a very difficult problem because land and marine ecosystems have not been studied comprehensively as an integrated system. In addition, difficulties in monitoring and predicting unhealthy conditions appear to be due to the absence of high frequency (both special and temporal) observations in the area, absence of models to forecast the indicated natural disasters and impacts and no timely data collection, use and interpretation. In recent years, accumulated satellite data, together with ground measurements, helped to investigate the links between land and marine ecosystems. In the present study, we combine satellite and in situ measurements with a modeling approach to characterize integrated "land-marine" ecosystem and investigate physical and biophysical interactions in the coastal zone, which includes marine in the northwestern Black Sea and land in the southwestern Ukraine. This paper will present: (a) interrelation between land and marine ecosystems; (b) correlation analysis of satellite-based marine characteristics with optical-biological parameters, (c) analysis of such hazards as hypoxia, hydrosulphuric infection and eutrophication and (d) model development for forecasting the benthonic hypoxia from the satellite-based marine and land characteristics. Satellite data will include AVHRR, MODIS and SeaWiF.