The Bohai Sea is a semi-enclosed shallow sea in China, where the tides and wind are the dominant factors contributing to the water exchange with the Yellow Sea. However, existing studies on this water exchange primarily consider only the effect of tidal action, neglecting the contribution of wind. In this study, numerical models were used to simulate the hydrodynamic processes and tracer transport, with the consideration of both tides and wind. Based on the models, the two time scales, age and half-life, are applied to study the water exchange in the Bohai Sea quantitatively. The results show that the age and half-life decrease significantly when wind is included in the simulation, revealing that wind is an important contributor to the water exchange in such a semi-enclosed shallow sea. Under the combined forcing of tides and wind, the water transport in the Bohai Sea becomes clockwise, in contrast with the counterclockwise transport driven by the tides only. The seasonal-varying wind leads to a fluctuation of water exchange in an annual cycle, with the stronger water exchange in the northern (Liaodong Bay) and the western (Bohai Bay) regions of the Bohai Sea in winter and in the southern part (Laizhou Bay) in summer.

Coastal eutrophication is a major environmental issue worldwide. In the Baltic Sea, eutrophication affects both the coastal waters and the open sea. Various policy frameworks aim to hinder its progress but eutrophication-relevant water quality variables, such as chlorophyll-a concentrations, still exhibit opposite temporal trends in various Baltic Sea marine and coastal waters. In this study, we investigate the temporal-trend linkages of measured water quality variables and their various anthropogenic, climatic and hydrospheric drivers over the period 1990-2020 with focus on the Swedish coastal waters and related marine basins in the Baltic Sea. We find that it is necessary to distinguish more and less isolated coastal waters, based on their water exchanges with the open sea, to capture different coastal eutrophication dynamics. In less isolated coastal waters, eutrophication is primarily related to nitrogen concentrations, while it is more related to phosphorus concentrations in more isolated coastal waters. In the open sea, trends in eutrophication conditions correlate best with trends in climatic and hydrospheric drivers, like wind speed and water salinity, respectively. In the coastal waters, driver signals are more mixed, with considerable influences from anthropogenic land-based nutrient loads and sea-ice cover duration. Summer chlorophyll-a concentration in the open sea stands out as a main change driver of summer chlorophyll-a concentration in less isolated coastal waters. Overall, coastal waters are a melting pot of driver influences over various scales, from local land-based drivers to large-scale total catchment and open sea conditions. The latter in turn depend on long-term integration of pathway-dependent influences from the various coastal parts of the Baltic Sea and their land-based nutrient load drivers, combined with overarching climate conditions and internal feedback loops. As such, our results challenge any unidirectional local source-to-sea paradigm and emphasize a need for concerted local land-catchment and whole-sea measures for robust coastal eutrophication management.

This study shows that there are two regions with high trace metal concentrations in the Bohai Bay, China. The numerical hydrodynamic model coupled with geochemical analysis was applied to understand the mass transport and sedimentation in the bay. The modeling results show that the two regions are located within the residual current vortexes. Results from the particle-tracking model indicate that the trace metals released from the land sources enter the regions and take a relatively long residence time in the vortexes. The sediment radionuclide data indicates that the two regions experienced continuous and high sedimentation, and trace metals are prone to deposit in the regions. The correlations among trace metals, residual currents and radionuclides data suggest that the tides are the governing factor controlling the distributions of the trace metals in the bay. The consistence among these results also supports the reliabilities of the numerical simulation results of water and trace metal transport in this study.

A harbor seal’s whisker is able to sense the trailing vortices of marine organisms due to its unique three-dimensional wavy shape, which suppresses the vibrations caused by its own vortex-shedding, while exciting large-amplitude and synchronized vibrations in a wake flow. This provides insight into the development of whisker-inspired sensors, which have broad applications in the fields of ocean exploration and marine surveys. However, the harbor seal’s whisker may lose its vibration suppression ability when the angle of attack (AoA) of the incoming flow is large. In order to explore the flow-induced vibration (FIV) features of a harbor seal’s whisker at various angles of attack ($\theta =0$–${90}^{\circ }$), this study experimentally investigates the effect of AoA on the vibration response of a whisker model in a wide range of reduced velocities ($U_r$ = 3–32.2) and the Reynolds number, Re = 400–7000, in a circulating water flume. Meanwhile, for the sake of comparison, the FIV response of an elliptical cylinder with the same equivalent diameters is also presented. The results indicate that an increase in AoA enhances the vibration amplitude and expands the lock-in range for both the whisker model and the elliptical cylinder. The whisker model effectively suppresses vibration responses at $\theta =0^{\circ }$ due to its unique three-dimensional wavy shape. However, when $\theta \ge {30}^{\circ }$, the wavy surface structure gradually loses its suppression ability, resulting in large-amplitude vibration responses similar to those of the elliptical cylinder. For $\theta$ = 30${}^{\circ }$ and 45${}^{\circ }$, the vibration responses of the whisker model and the elliptical cylinder undergo three vibration regimes, i.e., vortex-induced vibration, transition response, and turbulent-induced vibration, with the increasing $U_r$. However, at $\theta$ = 60${}^{\circ }$ and 90${}^{\circ }$, the vortex-shedding gradually controls the FIV response, and only the vortex-induced vibration is observed.