  Floating marine debris represent a threat to marine and coastal ecology.
Since the Mediterranean basin is one of the highly impacted regions, both by
the coastal pollution as well as from sea traffic, the potential harm of a
floating pollution on the marine ecology could be overwhelming in this area.
Our study area covers the central Mediterranean crossing that connects the
western and eastern Mediterranean and is one of the areas impacted by a high
intensity of sea traffic. To identify regions in the central Mediterranean that
could be more exposed by high concentration of floating marine pollutants we
use Leeway model for lower windage small-size particles. We perform numerical
simulation of a large ensemble of Lagrangian particles that approximate at-sea
debris. The particles are forced by high-resolution sea kinematics from the
Copernicus Marine Environment Monitoring Service (CMEMS) and 10 m atmospheric
wind from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) for
two reference periods in summer and winter of 2013--2016. We identify the
regions with a high accumulation of particles in terms of particle surface
densities per unit area. Although seasonal and annual variability of ocean
current and atmospheric wind is an important factor that influences
accumulation regimes across the central Mediterranean, we found that the border
of the Libyan shelf harbors larger percentage of particles after 30 days of
simulation.
