Abstract
Between 1973 and 2017, evidences of red tide outbreaks and oil spill accidents in the Chinese coastal waters were collected. Statistical analysis and multiple regression models were used to determine the relationship between the red tide and the oil spill. Major findings reveal that (1) the frequency of red tides positively correlates to the number of oil spills and the volume of oil spilled as well; (2) the higher percentage of small spills (< 7 tonnes) are more likely to enhance the outbreaks of red tides; (3) both EI Niño and storm events do not show any relationship with red tides; and (4) more severe oil spill with penalty recorded implies a higher possibility to trigger the red tide afterwards. Therefore, oil spill contingency management focusing on small oil spills and mitigating their spill effect by physical measures could be of benefit to decrease the frequency of red tides significantly. For example, it is suggested to carry out physical combat instead of chemical dispersants to remove the spilled small oil in the shallow coastal areas for reducing the outbreak risk of red tides after the oil spill.
Highlights
Red tide is considered as the harmful algal bloom discoloring seawater in a short term (Huang et al 2018)
No clear trend is observed for EI Niño events linked to red tides, as the correlation index between EI Niño events and red tides is very low to be − 0.003 only
Our study initially found the positive correlation between the red tide occurrence and the number of oil spill pollution based on a long-term historic data from 1973 to 2017 at the national scale of China
Summary
Red tide is considered as the harmful algal bloom discoloring seawater in a short term (Huang et al 2018). Oil spill as one of the major coastal pollutions has not yet been studied for its association with the red tide for a long term at a nation level, only very few documents reported the algae bloomed following the Penglai 19-3 oil spill in the Chinese Bohai Sea as stated by Guo et al (2012). With the availability of observation data over a long period of time from 1973 to 2017 at the national scale of China, we made a first attempt to examine the relationship between the red tide events and the oil spill to fill the gap in the literature on the one hand and to provide operational methods for declining the outbreaks of red tide on the other hand.
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