VARIABILITY OF SHELF AND ADJACENT SEAS

The transport-dispersion of industrial discharges and urban pollution in the coastal zone is characterized by length scales from hundreds of meters to kilometers and time scales from hours to days. An exhaustive experimental investigation of hydrodynamic and dispersion phenomena in the coastal zone of Varna, in the Black Sea, was carried out, in the summer 1984, by a joint team of Soviet and Bulgarian oceanographers. Some of the main results are briefly discussed here in illustration of the complexity of the marine system and the variability of processes to be taken into account in models of shelf and adjacent seas.