,,,- CMCC Foundation - Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change, Division of Global Coastal Ocean, Lecce, Italy (svitlana.liubartseva@cmcc.it)
Plastics released into the sea are considered a significant global problem due to their substantial environmental, economic, social, political, and cultural consequences.
Knowledge of plastic sources is fundamental for monitoring and modeling the transport and fate of plastics in the environment. This work focuses on plastic fluxes from the Mediterranean coastal population, which have been identified as the primary sources of plastic pollution in the basin.
Data from the NASA/NOAA Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) Day/Night Band (DNB) onboard the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Platform (SNPP) are used as indicators for population-related plastic fluxes into the area. We process the monthly cloud-free composites provided by the Earth Observation Group at the National Geophysical Data Center in Boulder, Colorado, US (Elvidge et al., 2017).
A new algorithm distributes a predefined total annual plastic flux (Kaandorp et al., 2020), proportionally to nighttime lights in a coastal region, taking into account country-specific correction factors obtained from Human Development Indices (Mai et al., 2020). Our analysis examines the estimates of total annual plastic flux that vary by three orders of magnitude at present. Uncertainties in country-specific correction factors are also reviewed.
The averaged 2015–2024 plastic fluxes kg/day from the coastal Mediterranean population are represented at a horizontal resolution of 15 arcseconds. In addition, country-level plastic contributions are provided, quantified, and compared.
A freely available dataset is ready for modeling and source-focused observation planning through PANGAEA: https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.987840
This work was carried out within the framework of the Space It Up Project funded by the Italian Space Agency (ASI) and the Ministry of University and Research (MUR) – contract n. 2024-5-E.0 – CUP n. I53D24000060005.
References
Elvidge, C.D., Baugh, K., Zhizhin, M., Hsu, F.C., Ghosh, T., 2017. VIIRS night-time lights. Int. J. Remote Sens., 38,5860–5879. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/01431161.2017.1342050
Kaandorp, M.L., Dijkstra, H.A., Van Sebille, E., 2020. Closing the Mediterranean marine floating plastic mass budget: Inverse modeling of sources and sinks. Environ. Sci. Technol., 54, 11980–11989. DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.1021/acs.est.0c01984
Mai, L., Sun, X.-F., Xia, L.-L., Bao, L.-J., Liu, L.-Y., Zeng, E.Y., 2020. Global riverine plastic outflows. Environ. Sci. Technol. 54, 10049–10056. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.est.0c02273
How to cite: Liubartseva, S., Coppini, G., Causio, S., and Campanati, C.: How can we obtain seaward plastic fluxes from the Mediterranean coastal population using NASA's Black Marble data?, EGU General Assembly 2026, Vienna, Austria, 3–8 May 2026, EGU26-4774, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu26-4774, 2026.
