Environmental sensitivity mapping and risk assessment for oil spill along the Chennai Coast in India

Progress in Physical Geography: Earth and Environment

2020

The year 2019 marks the anniversary of two major US offshore oil spills: the 50th anniversary of the Santa Barbara spill and the 30th anniversary of the Exxon Valdez. The consequences of these spills are profound, echoing throughout countless environmental, ecological and social systems. Each spill sparked a flurry of research focusing on the analysis and documentation of spill impacts and responses. The purpose of this progress report is to evaluate oil spill modeling research as a knowledge domain. Using bibliometric analysis techniques, we constructed a co-citation network for exploring key areas of research and seminal papers to highlight the evolution of oil spill research over the past 50 years. The paper concludes with recommendations for future work, detailing the importance of connecting the physical and social sciences for deepening our understanding of oil spills and their broader implications for communities and the environment.

Section: Overview Of the Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Oil spill modeling: Mapping the knowledge domain

Progress in Physical Geography: Earth and Environment

2020

“…As detailed previously, the Deepwater Horizon event triggered a substantial resurgence in the development and testing of methods to quantify actual and potential impact [57,69]. This process is necessarily data driven, relying on the incorporation of data sets to represent the vulnerability of coastal communities which can be distinguished by sector (biologic, economic, social) and then grouped together for a composite vulnerability measure (Table A1).…”

Section: Impact Calculationmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Implications of Oil Exploration off the Gulf Coast of Florida

2018

JMSE

In the United States (U.S.), oil exploration and production remain critical economic engines for local, state, and federal economies. Recently, the U.S. Department of the Interior expressed interest in expanding offshore oil production by making available lease areas in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico, the U.S. West Coast and East Coast, as well as offshore Alaska. With the promise of aiding in energy independence, these new lease areas could help solidify the U.S. as one of the world's largest oil-producing countries, while at the same time bolstering the local and regional energy job sectors. Of all the newly proposed lease areas, the Gulf Coast of Florida is particularly contentious. Opponents of drilling in the area cite the sensitive ecosystems and the local and state tourism economy that depends heavily on the numerous beaches lining Florida's coast. In this analysis, we use a data-driven spatial analytic approach combined with advanced oil spill modeling to determine the potential impact of oil exploration off of Florida's Gulf Coast given a loss-of-control event. It is determined that plume behavior varies drastically depending on the location of the spill but that overall impacts are comparable across all spill scenario sites, highlighting the necessity of contingency-type analyses. Implications for spill response are also discussed.

“…If the measures include aspatial elements, the result is more akin to a global vulnerability measure (Birkmann, 2006). Regardless of the specific context or data used, a simple summation of index values across sectors and/or weights can be applied (Bauer et al, 2015: 60; Cai et al, 2015; Kankara et al, 2016). When weights are used, a normalization procedure is required, prior to weighting, to ensure that each facet of vulnerability exists on a common scale.…”

Section: Modeling Spill Risk Vulnerability and Impactmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Consider, for example, the general approach to oil spill impact modeling as demonstrated by Kankara et al (2016). In it, ESI classifications, scientific value, environmental importance, and level of economic activity contribute to a developed risk index (Kankara and Subramanian, 2007), which is then combined with GNOME spill outputs.…”

Section: Impact Assessmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Oil spill modeling

Progress in Physical Geography: Earth and Environment

2017

Oil spill modeling is fundamental for planning and preparing for, as well as responding to and mitigating, actual spill events. As a result, significant research effort has been directed toward developing analytical approaches for deepening our understanding of spill risk, community vulnerability, oil behavior, spill outcomes, and impacts. The purpose of this paper is to provide a synthesis of the oil spill risk assessment and impact modeling literature, with a focus on the vulnerability of local environmental, ecological, and community systems, as well as the geographic processes associated with modeling spills and transforming these data into a robust and meaningful impact assessments. The results of this progress report reveal a number of methodological and substantive commonalities across the scientific literature. Moreover, the synthesis of this literature should provide researchers with a strong foundation for pursuing future work in this domain.