Survey, 2010-05-27, Black Sea

North-eastern Black Sea 2010, Sochi shelf

A May 2010 LIF LiDAR survey of the north-eastern Black Sea shelf off Sochi, 15,004 returns over a steep, narrow continental margin where river and coastal inputs raise suspended matter against otherwise clear sub-tropical sea water.

Published figures

Interpolated fields from the campaign, reproduced as issued. Plate titles carry the LIFL-9 under its original designation, UFL-9.

Interpolated chlorophyll a field mapped along the lidar track, Sochi shelf, 27 May 2010 — Fig. 1Chlorophyll a

Interpolated CDOM field mapped along the lidar track, Sochi shelf, 27 May 2010 — Fig. 2CDOM

Interpolated total suspended solids field mapped along the lidar track, Sochi shelf, 27 May 2010 — Fig. 3TSS

Sochi shelfBlack Sea

● NE Black Sea 2010, 2010-05-2715,004 measurements IDW interpolation, 600 samples

Chl-a0.310.81µg/L

CDOM0.000.74a.u.

TSS2.0824.1mg/L

Fig. 4 Campaign scan. 15,004 lidar returns along the ship track, switchable across Chl-a, CDOM, TSS. Field view interpolates the channel across the surveyed water from the same measurements (inverse-distance weighting). Shoreline: Natural Earth.

The north-eastern Black Sea has a steep, narrow shelf where the Caucasus coast drops quickly to deep water and small mountain rivers deliver pulses of sediment after rain. In May 2010 a LIF LiDAR ran a 15,004-point survey across the Sochi shelf, sampling chlorophyll a, CDOM and suspended matter along the coast.

Chlorophyll a runs near 0.45 µg/L over the shelf, with suspended matter the more variable channel, median around 3 mg/L but reaching well above 15 mg/L in the coastal band closest to river outflow. Resolving that nearshore-to-offshore gradient continuously is where a fast ship-mounted sensor outperforms the sparse station grids that conventional shelf monitoring relies on.