Geoinformation technologies of environmental monitoring in the Black Sea after Kakhovska hydroelectric power plant disaster

Abstract

The article offers the implementation of the proposed approach to the assessment and forecasting of indicators of environmental monitoring of marine water areas. It is an important component of the process of information support for decision-making in the field of environmental safety. The south-western part of the Black Sea water area was as the test region, was suffered from a negative environmental impact of a terrorist attack by Russian armed forces in the area of the Kakhovskaya hydroelectric power plant. The attack caused the destruction of the facility and the leakage of water from the Kakhovska reservoir with catastrophic consequences for the Northern Black Sea region. The authors proposed to apply a combination of data from contact monitoring of hydrophysical indicators, remote sensing data and mathematical modeling based on geospatial data in the specialized geo-information software environment Delft3D Mesh Suite within the framework of the developed software component. The component provides for the automation of data collection and processing processes followed by modeling and forecasting and visualization hydrophysical processes in the water area. On the basis of the applied information technologies, an analysis was carried out and geomodels were built, describing the hydrophysical situation in the northwestern part of the Black Sea both before the disaster and after certain time intervals after it, like a week and a month). The dynamics of seawater salinity as an important indicator of the potential increase of biogenic substances in the composition of seawater, as well as the nature of the circulation of water masses, which can provide additional information about the features of the geographical distribution of pollutants in the area affected by the disaster, were analyzed. The need for further real-time ecological monitoring of the consequences of the disaster, especially in the most affected parts of the water area near the northwestern coast of the Black Sea and on the coastal areas of the land in this region with the implementation of the proposed information technologies, is substantiated.