These errors can hardly be treated as insignificant, but such is the nature of the object of these studies and at this stage in the research we have to accept them as they are. The properties of the waters of the Pomeranian lakes investigated in this study are highly diverse: all the waters can be classified as Case 2 according to the optical classification of Morel & Prieur (1977). They can be conventionally subdivided into 3 types. Type I lakes have the lowest concentrations of OAC and optical properties (including the reflectance spectra Rrs(λ)) similar to those of Baltic Sea waters (see e.g. Darecki et al., 2003 and Woźniak

et al., 2011). The waters of Type II lakes (humic lakes) have extremely high levels of CDOM, hence their brown colour in daylight and very low reflectances Rrs(λ) (of the order of 0.001 sr−1). Type III waters click here are highly eutrophic, containing large amounts of SPM, including phytoplankton (see Table 2). Hence the reflectances Rrs(λ) of these Type III waters are on average one order of magnitude higher than those of the other waters, reaching maximum values of 0.03 sr−1 in λ bands p38 MAPK inhibitor 560–580 nm and 690–720 nm; see Figure 6 and Ficek et al. (2011). The empirical relations obtained between selected inherent optical properties (IOPs) of Type I and III lake waters and the characteristics

of the reflectance Rrs(λ) make it possible to utilize the latter for an approximate determination of these IOPs. “
“Mesoscale eddies appear over the continental slope at the edge of the main deep water basin circulation due to the baroclinic instability of the main current. Diameters of such eddies are between 2 and 7 of Rd, where Rd is the local Rossby radius

of baroclinic deformation ( Zatsepin et al. 2011). At the next level of the cascade of energy dissipation are the smaller sub-mesoscale eddies (radius < Rd). These are of the scales of 1–10 km and 1–100 hours and are formed over the shelf and coastal slope, and their evolution depends very much on bottom topography and coastal Miconazole orography ( Zatsepin et al. 2011). Flow disturbance caused by coastal obstacles (or an island) leads to the generation of a wake eddy located on the lee side ( Chubarenko et al., 2000 and Harlan et al., 2002). All these eddy structures play an important role in horizontal and vertical mixing, contributing significantly to coastal – open sea water exchange ( Bassin et al. 2005), and also having an influence on coastal morpho- and lithodynamic processes. The study area (Figure 1), the south-eastern Baltic (SEB), is characterized by relatively high rates of erosion, the range of mean rates being 0.2–1.5 m per year for the whole coastline, depending on the period of calculation (Chubarenko et al. 2009).