2003), and AZD9291 in vitro even smaller at the easternmost end of the Gulf, where it sometimes reaches values as small as 500 m. The experience of several recent studies of the dynamics and hydrography of different sea areas suggests that although the instantaneous fields of simulated currents are quite different and even the statistics of currents shows substantial changes for different model resolutions (Albretsen & Røed 2010), the salinity or temperature fields can be reasonably replicated using models that poorly resolve the mesoscale dynamics. Moreover, these fields remain practically

the same at different resolutions (Myrberg et al. 2010, Andrejev et al. 2010). For example, the simulations in Andrejev et al. (2010) show that the structure of the simulated current field in the Gulf of Finland may change its character abruptly when the resolution is increased from 0.5 nautical miles (nm) to 0.25 nm but that the salinity and temperature fields are almost the same as for a resolution

of 1 nm (Andrejev et al. 2010). In this paper we address the question of whether the above-mentioned maps of environmental risks (reflecting, in essence, long-term statistics of the current-driven transport constructed using large pools of Lagrangian trajectories), or at least certain Everolimus price of their integral features, belong to the family of those characteristics that are mostly insensitive to changes at the resolution of the underlying ocean model. The test area is the Gulf of Finland, the easternmost extension of the Baltic Sea (Figure 1). This is an elongated water body with a length of ca 400 km, a maximum width of 135 km and a mean depth of only 37 m (Soomere et al. 2008). It is a basin with extremely complicated internal dynamics (Andrejev et al. 2004a,b, Soomere et al. 2010), for which the basic idea of the use of intrinsic dynamics of water masses for the smart relocation of potentially dangerous activities

was first formulated by Soomere & Quak (2007). The gulf hosts heavy east-west Sitaxentan cargo traffic (HELCOM 2009) and very intensive passenger traffic across it in the relatively narrow section between Tallinn and Helsinki (Parnell et al. 2008, Kurennoy et al. 2009). As the gulf is less than 80 km wide in some places and the water too shallow for marine transportation in others, there are several narrow passages where the concentration of traffic is exceptionally high. Therefore, there exists a high probability that various adverse impacts (oil or chemical pollution, lost containers or other large floating objects, etc.) may be released along the shipping route as a result of an accident, technical problems or human error or misbehaviour. The most dangerous event from the environmental viewpoint is a large-scale oil pollution event hitting the coastal area. For this reason, we perform the analysis in terms of the problem of identifying the environmentally safest fairway along the gulf with respect to coastal oil pollution.