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Book Reference Compilation of presentations at BICEpS colloquium 2018. Annexe to BICEpS Annual report 2018 – Reinforcing Belgian ICES People.
The International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES; French: Conseil International pour l'Exploration de la Mer, CIEM) is an intergovernmental marine science organization that brings together the efforts and knowledge of 20 Member States, bordering the North Atlantic and the Arctic Circumpolar Zone, on physical oceanography, marine ecosystems and fisheries management. Nowadays, more than 70 Belgian scientists are directly involved in the work of the 150 bodies and expert groups of ICES, which gather the expertise of more than 1500 scientists yearly, totalling up to 5000 scientists from over 700 marine institutes and organizations over the years. This important and often voluntary dedication of Belgian scientists to the work of ICES deserves more visibility among the Belgian scientific community itself and to policy makers.This is, among others, why the BICEpS initiative was launched. BICEpS general aim is to offer a platform to the Belgian ICES community to get to know each other, to improve collaboration and share information, and to promote ICES to the wider scientific community in Belgium. BICEpS Annual report 2018 presents the genesis and first year of activity of this initiative created to reinforce Belgian ICES people. The report targets marine scientists, marine managers and policy makers. It presents the demarche leading to the creation of the BICEpS community and activities conducted in 2018. The report contains the list of Belgian ICES members in 2018 with their membership to the different ICES working groups, and the results of the first BICEpS Colloquium organised on 14 November 2018 and hosted by RBINS in Brussels (outcome of a participatory discussion on the future of BICEpS, abstracts of communications presented and list of participants. The report is also published on ICES's website at http://ices.dk/community/groups/Documents/BICEPS/BICEPpS-Annual-Report-2018.pdf. The abstracts of the colloquium are supplemented by a separate annex published online which assembles the PowerPoint presentations of the colloquium accessible at http://ices.dk/community/groups/Documents/BICEPS/BICEpS-2018-Colloquium-Presentations.pdf
Located in Library / RBINS Staff Publications 2018
Manual Reference Congo basin integrated monitoring for forest carbon mitigation and biodiversity - COBIMFO
Located in Library / RBINS Staff Publications 2017
Techreport Reference Core Description Mol-GT-01 Westphalian – Namurian – Dinantian.
Located in Library / RBINS Staff Publications 2018
Techreport Reference CREST Final Administrative Report
Located in Library / RBINS Staff Publications 2020
Techreport Reference CREST Voortgangsverslag mei 2019. Prepared for IWT
Located in Library / RBINS Staff Publications 2019
Techreport Reference D2.1 - Literature review on past accident
Maritime transport of Hazardous and Noxious Substances (HNS) has increased for 20 years, involving the risk of major pollution accidents with potentially more hazardous than oil. Chemicals may involve long-term environmental effects and the risks for public safety can be more severe for chemical releases (European Maritime Safety Agency [EMSA], 2007). Approximately 2,000 chemicals are transported by sea and only a few hundred chemicals are transported in bulk, but it represents the main volume of the chemical trade (Purnell, 2009). Alongside the expansion of chemicals transported at sea, incidents involving chemical tankers increased accordingly. Still, information on past and more recent incidents is not easily available. Furthermore, in the case of marine accident involving HNS, spill response is difficult due to the chemicals spilled, particularly when gas or volatile substances are released. The vapour cloud created can be toxic, flammable or explosive and there is a necessity to protect the crew, the population nearby as well as the environment and the stakeholders involved in marine pollution response. As an example, Figure 1 shows a picture of the explosion which occurred in September 2019 in the Ulsan harbour, South Korea. This explosion is the consequence of a styrene monomer leak on the chemical tanker Stolt Groenland that led to a massive explosion with fireball and mushroom cloud. The present report is a literature review on past accidents that have induced the formation of a toxic, flammable or explosive gas cloud. The information gathered will allow better identification of 1) the categories of chemicals most involved; 2) the main risks generated by the gas cloud dispersion in the air and 3) the consequences of a chemical slick on fire at the water surface as well as the hazard due to a vapour cloud explosion. This work is part of WP2: Enhancing knowledge and data on gases and evaporators of the MANIFESTS program (Managing risks and impacts from evaporating and gaseous substances to population safety) that studies risks associated to accidental chemical spills in the marine environment. The aim of this WP is to contribute to a better prediction of the consequences of vapour clouds due to marine accidents. This would facilitate the intervention of marine pollution organisms and would also help to protect population nearby, as we would know precisely where the dangerous area is.
Located in Library / RBINS Staff Publications 2021 OA
Unpublished Reference D3.3 Cumulative sediment dispersal mapping of seafloor-disturbing activities
Located in Library / RBINS Staff Publications 2024 OA
Techreport Reference D4.1 Explosive risk and fire module
Responding to maritime accidents can be extremely challenging when involving HNS that behave as evaporators. Due to their potential to form toxic or combustible clouds, evidence-based decisions are needed to protect the crew, responders, the coastal population and the environment. However, when an emergency is declared, key information is not always available for all the needs of responders. A case in point is the lack of knowledge and data to assess the risks that responders or rescue teams could take when intervening, or those that could impact coastal communities when allowing a shipping casualty to dock at a place of refuge. The MANIFESTS project aims to address these uncertainties and improve response and training capacities through the development of an operational decision-support system (DSS) for volatile HNS spills. Besides management and communication, the project includes four other work packages: WP2 on collecting new data on evaporators, WP3 on table top exercises and field training, WP4 on improving modelling tools and WP5 on the development of the DSS. Key expected outcomes include: · Operational guidance; · Desktop and field exercises; · In situ training; · Experimental data on gas cloud fate; · A brand-new fire and explosion modelling module; · Improved HNS database with new experimental data on evaporation/dissolution kinetics. This report presents the results obtained in the framework of the task 4.1 aiming at developing tools that would help responders to asses risks in case of explosion and of fire of volatile HNS. The fire module computes the energy flux as a function of the distance to the fire source. It is useful to assess the safety distance at which e.g. a boat can approach a fire while keeping the crew safe. The energy flux can cause burning to people, and start new fire. The burning rate is also estimated. The explosion module computes the overpressure of the shockwave caused by the combustion of a chemical. This overpressure can be very dangerous for people and structure, causing wounds from minor injury to death and destruction of building. The model could be used to predict what could happen in case of the explosion of a stored explosive for instance. The two models are simplifications of the reality and do not take everything into account. Their results can be useful to have a rough idea of what could happen in open sea but should always be interpreted keeping the model hypotheses and limitations in mind. Due to the sensitivity of the topic, the source code of both modules is not made available to public
Located in Library / RBINS Staff Publications 2021
Techreport Reference D4.2 Improving the prediction of HNS concentration in the atmosphere
Responding to maritime accidents can be extremely challenging when involving HNS that behave as evaporators. Due to their potential to form toxic or combustible clouds, evidence-based decisions are needed to protect the crew, responders, the coastal population and the environment. However, when an emergency is declared, key information is not always available for all the needs of responders. A case in point is the lack of knowledge and data to assess the risks that responders or rescue teams could take when intervening, or those that could impact coastal communities when allowing a shipping casualty to dock at a place of refuge. The MANIFESTS project aims to address these uncertainties and improve response and training capacities through the development of an operational decision-support system (DSS) for volatile HNS spills. Besides management and communication, the project includes four other work packages: WP2 on collecting new data on evaporators, WP3 on table top exercises and field training, WP4 on improving modelling tools and WP5 on the development of the DSS. Key expected outcomes include: · Operational guidance; · Desktop and field exercises; · In situ training; · Experimental data on gas cloud fate; · A brand-new fire and explosion modelling module; · Improved HNS database with new experimental data on evaporation/dissolution kinetics. This report presents the developments realized in the framework of the task 4.2. This task gave the opportunity to the MANIFESTS consortium to improve one or several features of their models allowing to better simulate the HNS concentration in the atmosphere. Only RBINS seizes this opportunity and has implemented in OSERIT some improvements in order to better simulate the HNS concentration at the sea surface, evaporation processes and finally has implemented a new atmosphere transport and dispersion model. OSERIT (Oil Spill Evaluation and Response Integrated Tool) is a model which describes the drift of a pollutant at sea using Lagrangian particle. It can be used in case of an accident with release of oil or chemical, to obtain an estimation of the pollution trajectory as well as some basic information about its behavior and fate at sea. In the framework of the MANIFESTS project, a new atmospheric dispersion module fully coupled to OSERIT has been developed and several marine processes have been improved. In this report, the improved processes are described and their actual implementation in OSERIT is explained.
Located in Library / RBINS Staff Publications 2022 OA
Techreport Reference D4.3 - Models intercomparison
Maritime transport represents more than 80% of the international trade volume (UNCTAD, 2017). Apart from crude oil, tanker trades of refined petroleum products, chemicals and gas have increased by 4% over the 2019-2021 period, with a 5.6% growth in Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) trade (UNCTAD, 2022). The volume of hazardous and noxious substances (HNS) is thus constantly rising with an increased risk of accidental spillages potentially associated with marine pollutions, whether in ports or in the open sea. In the event of an incident and a spill in the environment, information on the fate of the chemical(s) involved is essential to better anticipate the risks incurred by responders and populations, the impacts on the environment as well as the appropriate response techniques (Mamaca et al., 2009). Chemicals accidentally spilled into the marine or aquatic environment generally undergo physical-chemical modifications that will characterize their behaviour and fate. As observed by Mamaca et al. (2004) and Le Floch et al. (2011), these modifications are dependent on the intrinsic parameters of the product involved, the in situ environmental parameters (temperature, density and salinity of the water) and the met-ocean conditions (e.g. sea state, wind speed, marine currents). A few hours following the spill short-term effects may thus occur such as spreading, natural dispersion in the water column (dissolution, emulsification) and evaporation into the atmosphere. Longer term degradation (e.g. polymerisation, biodegradation) and sedimentation processes can then follow, depending on the persistence and the nature of the substance. One of the main concerns is that around 2,000 different types of HNS are regularly shipped in bulk or package forms (Purnell, 2009) which thus make difficult to capture their behaviour if accidentally released in the environment. Of the wide variety of HNS traded, volatile and gaseous substances are particularly problematic for marine pollution response authorities. The release of such substances at sea can indeed lead to the formation of toxic, flammable, or explosive gas plumes – sometimes invisible to the naked eye – that can travel large distances and pose risks over a wide area in relatively short timescales. Yet, key information on the risks that responders or rescue teams could take when intervening, or those that could impact coastal communities and the environment when allowing a shipping casualty to dock at a place of refuge remain poorly known. The MANIFESTS EU-project is part of this context.
Located in Library / RBINS Staff Publications 2023 OA