SCIENCE CHINA

Earth Sciences
RESEARCH PAPER
August 2013 Vol.56 No.8: 14471451 doi: 10.1007/s11430-012-4520-2

An ensemble estimation of impact times and strength of Fukushima nuclear pollution to the east coast of China and the west coast of America
HAN GuiJun*, LI Wei, FU HongLi, ZHANG XueFeng, WANG XiDong, WU XinRong & ZHANG LianXin
Key Laboratory of Marine Environmental Information Technology, State Oceanic Administration, National Marine Data and Information Service, Tianjin 300171, China Received February 29, 2012; accepted July 8, 2012; published online November 8, 2012

Based on the statistics of all surface drifting buoys of 19782011 and Lagrangian tracers simulated from high quality ocean reanalysis currents, the impact times and strength of Fukushima nuclear pollution to the east coast of China and the west coast of America have been estimated. Under the circumstances of the radioactive pollutants drifting in the ocean surface, preliminary research results show that while the tracers took about 4 years to reach the west coast of USA, there are two types of tracers to carry out Fukushima nuclear pollutants to reach the east coast of China, corresponding to 1.5-year recirculation gyre transport and 3.5-year subtropical circulation transport. The distributions of the impact strength at these time scales are given according to the variation of relative number concentration with time combined with the decaying rate of radioactive matter. For example, starting from 1% at 1.5-year, of the initial level at the originating area of Fukushima nuclear pollution, the impact strength of Cesium-137 in the South China Sea continuously increases up to 3% by 4 years, while the impact strength of Cesium-137 in the west coast of America is as high as 4% due to the role of strong Kuroshio-extension currents as a major transport mechanism of nuclear pollutants for that area. Fukushima nuclear pollution, ensemble estimation, surface drifting buoy, ocean reanalysis, Lagrangian tracer
Citation: Han G J, Li W, Fu H L, et al. An ensemble estimation of impact times and strength of Fukushima nuclear pollution to the east coast of China and the west coast of America. Science China: Earth Sciences, 2013, 56: 14471451, doi: 10.1007/s11430-012-4520-2

On the next day of the Japanese earthquake on March 11, 2011, the nuclear reactors in Fukushima Nuclear Power Plants began to explode. The nuclear reactor explosion resulted in a great amount of radioactive matter leaked into the sea neighboring to Fukushima. On March 30, 2011, the Japan Central News Agency reported the monitored radioactive pollutants that were 4000 times higher than the standard level. Whether or not these nuclear pollutants will be transported to the Pacific-neighboring countries through oceanic circulations becomes a world-wide concern. This
*Corresponding author (email: gjhan@mail.nmdis.gov.cn)

study focuses on the impact of Fukushima nuclear pollutants on the east coast of China and the west coast of America through oceanic surface currents.

Methodology

In the study, the radioactive pollutant in the ocean is treated as the mixture of many Lagrangian particulates, and each Lagrangian particulate represents a particulate of radioactive element. They can just move along both the horizontal and vertical directions, but cannot diffuse to the surrounding or mix with the surrounding sea water [1]. Given that vertiearth.scichina.com www.springerlink.com

Science China Press and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2012

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cal motion in the ocean is very small compared to horizontal advection, and it is also very difficult to be measured and simulated, the vertical movement of the radioactive pollutants is not taken into account in the present study, and the Lagrangian particulates of the radioactive pollutants are assumed to drift in the ocean surface. Based on the surface drifting buoys and nuclear pollutant particulate tracers simulated using ocean reanalysis surface current, the Lagrangian drifting trajectories and time scales of the radioactive pollutant particulates are estimated. 1.1 Observational data

drifting buoys), the statistical result from surface drifting buoys just gives a very good reference or only represents a possibility, but is not reliable statistics. 1.2 A high-resolution ocean reanalysis product

According to the public news reports on nuclear pollutants during March 1215, 2011, a small semi-circle region centered at Fukushima with a 300 km radius is used as the source region of nuclear pollutants (the pink area of Figure 1). This spatial scale of the pollutant source domain is consistent with the scale of the rapid mixing effect caused by the confluence of Oyashio and Kuroshio waters in this region [2]. Here we first conduct statistics on all surface drifting buoys of 19782011 that passed the defined source region of nuclear pollutants in any month (totally 176 buoys) and thus estimate the transport paths and time scales of the nuclear pollutant particulates. Since the selected surface drifting buoys passed the defined source region of nuclear pollutants not only in the March but also other months, they only give an approximate estimate to drifting trajectories and time scales of the nuclear pollutant particulates during March 1215, 2011 in terms of annual mean flows in the study domain. The lives of all selected surface drifting buoys are completely different, and some of them halted work after a few months so that their final drifting directions cannot be decided. As a result, the number of surface drifting buoys used in practice is actually less than 176. Due to the limitation of the sample size (the number of surface

A global ocean reanalysis system, parallel to the regional ocean reanalysis system in the coastal waters of China and adjacent seas under the project of CORA (China Ocean Reanalysis, http://www.cora.net.cn) [3], was established by the Key Lab of Marine Environmental Information Technology (MEIT), National Marine Data and Information Service (NMDIS). The model domain is set from 0 to 360E in longitude and from 75.25S to 84.75N in latitude. A global ocean reanalysis dataset (called CORA for short) of sea surface height (SSH), three dimensional temperature, salinity, and currents has achieved, covering a period of 25 years ranging from January 1985 to April 2009. It contains daily-mean fields of ocean state with 0.50.5 horizontal resolution telescoping to 0.25 meridional spacing near the equator and 35 vertical levels. The evaluation shows that the quality of the various ocean fields in the new global reanalysis is much improved due to the uses of a better model (the Massachusetts Institute of Technology General Circulation) [4], and an advanced multi-scale three dimensional variational data assimilation scheme [57]. The ocean model is forced by a new Cross-Calibrated, Multi-Platform (CCMP) ocean surface wind from Physical Oceanography Distributed Active Archive Center (PO.DAAC), and heat and water fluxes from National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP). The surface temperature and salinity of the model are relaxed to monthly climatology derived from SODA (Simple Ocean Data Assimilation) [8, 9], and the relaxation time scale is set to 100 days. The oceanic observation data assimilated into the model include satellite remote sensing sea surface temperature (SST), sea surface height anomaly (SSHa) from altimeters, temperature and salinity profiles taken from Argo and World Ocean Database 2009 (WOD09) maintained by National Oceanographic Data Center (NODC). 1.3 Simulated trajectories with reanalysis data by a Lagrangian approach To increase the sampling size and enhance the statistical representation, we then use 25-year (19852009) gridded CORA surface currents to produce a great number of simulated nuclear pollutant particulate tracers (totally 5638 for each year) to complete the statistical estimation. To do so, 5638 initial tracers are randomly deployed in the defined source region of nuclear pollutants (the pink area in Figure 1) on March 11 of each year for a total of 25 years. Then, the Lagrangian trajectories of the nuclear pollutant particulate tracers can be obtained using eq. (1) based on CORA surface currents.

Figure 1 Cartoon of groups of surface drifting buoys or simulated Lagrangian tracers that originate from the Fukushima area of nuclear reactor explosions and move eastward along the Kuroshio and Kuroshiroextension current to reach the west coast of America (blue) and move southwest (red) or eastward first and then westward (green) and finally reach the east coast of China. The numbers outside (inside) of parentheses are the number of buoys (tracers) that finally reach the east coast of China and the west coast of America denoted by dashed-red and dashed-yellow lines. The pink area represents the source region of nuclear pollutants, i.e. the originating region of the surface drifting buoys, which is defined as a semi-circle centered at Fukushima (black star) with a radius of 300 km.

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dx u ( x, y, t ), dt dy v( x, y, t ), dt

(1)

where u(x, y, t) and v(x, y, t) respectively denote the eastward component and northward component of the surface current at the t time for the point (x, y), which can be obtained by a linear interpolation of reanalysis currents. The pair of values (x, y) indicates the position of a nuclear pollutant particulate tracer. The discrete form of eq. (1) can be expressed as:
xi (tn 1 ) xi (tn ) dt u ( xi (tn ), yi (tn ), tn ), yi (tn 1 ) yi (tn ) dt v( xi (tn ), yi (tn ), tn ),

(2)

where the subscript i indicates the ith nuclear pollutant particulate tracer; the subscript n indicates the time step index; dt is the step size and equals to the time interval of the global ocean reanalysis used in this study, 7.5-min; tn is the time at the nth time step and equals to ndt+t0; t0, xi(t0) and yi(t0) indicate the initial time and position of the ith nuclear pollutant particulate tracer, respectively.

east coast area of China by the recirculation gyre (red curves of Figure 2). We conduct statistics on all simulated nuclear pollutant particulate tracers and found consistent subgroups of trajectories that enter the east coast area of China (red and green curves in Figure 3) and the west coast area of America (blue curves in Figure 3), but each subgroup has a great number of trajectories (numbers in parentheses of Figure 1). Whereas 3808 simulated trajectories enter the west coast area of America, there are 8373 simulated trajectories to enter the east coast area of China. This simulation tremendously increases the sampling size of the ensemble estimation. In particular, the number of the trajectories that travel with the subtropical circulation branch at the central Pacific and finally enter the east coast area of China increases up to 7608 (note only one such drifting buoy was found in the observational dataset). In addition, all tracers in the defined source region of nuclear pollutants start to drift in the March of each year, and it is more reasonable to use these tracers to estimate the drifting paths and time scales of nuclear pollutants during March 1215 compared to the surface drifting buoys. The time scales by which the nuclear pollutants are

2 Results
We first examined the trajectories of surface drifting buoys one by one to identify typical buoy trajectories to enter the east coast area of China defined by the west of 125E (dashed-red) and the west coast area of America defined by the east of 130W (dashed-yellow), schematically denoted by red, green and blue arrows in Figure 1. 80% (141) of 176 surface drifting buoys that passed by the defined source region of nuclear pollutants moved eastward along with Kuroshio and Kuroshio-extension currents, and only 20% moved southward. However, among 141 buoys that travelled along with the Kuroshio and Kuroshio-extension currents, only 13 finally reached the west coast area of America (denoted by the blue arrow in Figure 1), and five examples of these buoy trajectories are shown in Figure 2 by blue curves. On the other hand, among 141 buoys, some halted work during the drifting periods so that it cannot be determined whether they can finally reach the west coast area of America. Among the 35 buoys southward, only five turned their directions westward and finally reached the east coast area of China (the red and green curves in Figure 2). And one of them entered the South China Sea through the Luzon Strait. Just as the surface drifting buoys moving eastward along with Kuroshio and Kuroshio-extension currents, among 35 buoys, some halted work during the drifting periods so that it cannot be determined whether they can finally reach the east coast area of China. Among the five buoys reaching the east coast of China, one was found to travel with the subtropical circulation branch at the central Pacific and formed its relatively longer trajectory (the green curve of Figure 2) and the other four were brought into the

Figure 2 The trajectories of surface drifting buoys that originate from the Fukushima area of nuclear reactor explosions and finally reach the west coast of America (totally 13 out of 176, but only 5 shown here as the examples (blue)) and the east coast of China (totally four out of 176 for the case along with the recirculation gyre at the west Pacific area (red) and only 1 out of 176 for the case along with the subtropical circulation (green)). The pair of numbers represents the estimated travel time by which the trajectories reach the destination and the error bar (standard deviation) evaluated by the set of trajectories, respectively.

Figure 3 Same as in Figure 2, but for the reanalysis currents-simulated nuclear pollutant particulate tracers. Each subgroup is shown for five trajectories as examples. The mean travel time and the standard deviation are estimated from the set of simulated trajectories whose total amount is shown in the parentheses of Figure 1.

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transported to reach the east coast of China and the west coast of America are estimated through the travel time of the observed surface drifting buoys and simulated nuclear pollutant particulate tracers described above and denoted in Figures 2 and 3 by a pair of numbers (except for the case of the observed buoy trajectory following the subtropical circulation). This pair of numbers corresponds to the mean travel time and the standard deviation of the travel times estimated from the set of trajectories. Generally, the transport times estimated from the reanalysis currentssimulated nuclear pollutant particulate tracers are longer than the times estimated from the observed surface drifting buoys. Obviously, both the sampling size and the accuracy of the Lagrangian integration that is influenced by the reanalysis quality have contributions to the difference. If the surface drifting buoys, which passed by the defined source region of nuclear pollutants in other months and halted work in a short time after drifting, are removed, and the samples of selected surface drifting buoys are numerous enough, the result from the surface drifting buoys will become more reliable. The higher the precision of reanalysis data is, the more accurate the estimated result from tracers is. In the study, the greatest uncertainty is the time scale by which the nuclear pollutants are transported to reach the east coast of China through the surface drifting buoys following the subtropical circulation. From one surface drifting buoy, the estimated time is 1.6 years whereas from 7608 nuclear pollutant particulate tracers, the estimated time is 3.6 years. For other two subgroups of drifting paths, the uncertainty of the transport times is relatively small. The time scale of the nuclear pollutants reaching the west coast of America is 3.2 years if it is estimated using the surface drifting buoys and 3.9 years if it is estimated using the nuclear pollutant particulate tracers. The time scale of the nuclear pollutants reaching the east coast of China in the west of Pacific is 1.3 years if it is estimated from the surface drifting buoys and 1.8 years if it is estimated from the nuclear pollutant particulate tracers. From the phenomenon described above, we may focus on the importance of the increased sampling size by using the gridded reanalysis current data to produce the nuclear pollutant particulate tracers. The great number of reanalysis current-simulated nuclear pollutant particulate tracers makes it possible to estimate the distribution of the impact strength of the nuclear pollutants in the east coast area of China and the west coast area of America. In this study, since the nuclear pollutant in the ocean is treated as the mixture of many Lagrangian particulates, their concentration will be represented as number concentration, which equals to the numbers of nuclear pollutant particulate tracers in a unit area [1]. At any instantaneous time (relative to the initial time of the Fukushima nuclear reactor explosions), we can compute the change rate of number concentration of tracers relative to the initial number concentration of tracers in the originating region of nuclear pollutants to represent the relative number concen-

tration of nuclear pollutant particulate tracers. The distribution of the impact strength of a nuclear pollutant can be computed by combining the relative number concentration of the nuclear pollutant particulate tracers with the decaying rate of the related radioactive element. High levels of radioactive iodine-131 (with a half-life of about 8 days), cesium-137 (with a half life of about 30 years), and cesium-134 (with a half-life of about 2 years) have been reported to be found in the seawater adjacent to the Fukushima. The half life of cesium-137 is so long that it produces more damage to human. Figure 4 gives the examples of the distribution of the impact strength of Cesium-137 at year 1.5 (panel (a)), year 3.5 (panel (b)), and year 4 (panel (c)). From Figure 4, we can see that due to the local eddy role, starting from 1% at 1.5-year, of the initial level at the originating area of Fukushima nuclear pollution, the impact strength of Cesium-137 in the South China Sea continuously increases up to 3% by 4 years. It is worth noting that due to the current near the shore cannot be well reconstructed by the global ocean reanalysis, some nuclear pollutant particulate tracers may come to rest in the near shore area, which may result in additional uncertainty in the estimation of the impact strength. For the west coast area of America, the major transport mechanism of nuclear pollutants is the Kuroshio-extension currents. Thus, after four years, the impact strength of Cesium-137 is as high as 4%.

Discussions and summary

Based on public news reports on nuclear pollutants during March 1215, 2011, a small semi-circle region centered at Fukushima with a 300 km radius is used to define the source region of nuclear pollutants due to the nuclear reactor explosions of Fukushima Nuclear Power Plants. All surface drifting buoys of 19782011 that passed the defined source region of nuclear pollutants (totally 176) are collected to conduct statistics and estimate the impact times and strength of Fukushima nuclear pollution particulate to the east coast of China and the west coast of the United States of America (USA). To increase the sampling size and enhance the representation of the statistics, 25-year gridded reanalysis currents are used to produce a great number of nuclear pollutant particulate tracers. Estimated results show that while the tracers take about four years to reach the west coast of USA, there are two types of tracers to carry out Fukushima nuclear pollutants to reach the east coast of China, corresponding to 1.5-year recirculation gyre transport and 3.5-year subtropical circulation transport. The impact strength distributions at these time scales are given according to the variation of relative number concentration with time combined with the decaying rate of radioactive element. Results show that due to local eddy role, starting from 1% at 1.5-year, of the initial level, the impact strength of Cesium-137 in the South China Sea continuously increases up to 3% by four years. Since

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Figure 4 The distribution of the impact strength of Cesium-137 at year 1.5 (a), year 3.5 (b) and year 4 (c). The impact strength of a nuclear pollutant is computed by combining the relative number concentration of nuclear pollutant particulate tracers with the decaying rate of the related radioactive element. The relative number concentration is the change rate of the numbers of nuclear pollutant particulate tracers in a unit area relative to the initial numbers of nuclear pollutant particulate tracers in the originating region of nuclear pollutants.

the major transport mechanism of nuclear pollutants for the west coast area of America is the Kuroshio-extension currents, after four years, the impact strength of Cesium-137 in the west coast area of America is as high as 4%. Although the preliminary results estimated from surface drifting buoys and reanalysis currents-simulated nuclear pollutant particulate tracers are generally consistent, the number of surface drifting buoys and the accuracy of the reanalysis product must have a serious impact on the estimation accuracy. In follow-up studies, increase of observation data, uses of different ocean reanalysis products and analyses on the difference of the estimated results must increase the understanding of nuclear pollutant transport mechanisms and enhance the accuracy of estimated transport times and impact strength. Furthermore, the analysis of both real and simulated drifters and pollutant tracers in this study is not thorough and needs improvement, especially considering circumstances of three dimensional flow fields.
The authors thank the anonymous reviewers for their thorough examination and comments that were very useful for improving the manuscript.

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