Modeling marine oil spill trajectory and fate off Hurghada, Red Sea coast, Egypt

Abstract

Abdallah and Chantsev, 2022 discharge of crude oil and petroleum products into the surrounding environment (Kakalis & Ventikos, 2008; Mohammadiun et al., 2021). Tanker crashes, ship collisions, ruptured or leaking pipelines, blasted wells, deep sea drilling explosions, and refining activities are the most prevalent causes of oil spills into seawater (Kachel, 2008; Singha, 2014; Fingas, 2016). In all cases, it severely harms the living marine communities, estuaries, coral reefs and mangroves (Escobar, 2019; Magris & Giarrizzo, 2020). While in some cases, significant damage may occur to coastal infrastructure (as tourist resorts, ports and marinas) and industries that rely on seawater input (as marine salt production, coastal power stations, and desalination plants) (Salomon & Markus, 2018). Due to the oil spills worldwide (Gurumoorthi et al., 2021), nearly two million tons of oil containing persistent and toxic chemicals enter the marine environment annually (Ivshina et al., 2015). When oil spills into seawater, it undergoes a range of chemical and physical transformations, collectively known as weathering (Daling & Strom, 1999; Fingas, 2005; Lončar, Beg Paklar & Janeković, 2012). The most prominent oil spill weathering processes are evaporation, natural dispersion, and emulsification (Pradhan, Das & Pradhan, 2021). In recent years, societal demands for a sustainable ecological status of the marine environment have forced governments to establish appropriate and effective oil spill contingency plans (Dietrich et al., 2012).According to Abdallah and Chantsev (2022), assessing the impact of oil spills on vulnerable areas is necessary to develop appropriate and effective oil spill contingency plans. These plans could be realized using predictive mathematical models to simulate the oil slicks' trajectory and behavior (Mishra & Kumar, 2015).Mathematical oil spill models are mainly based on the Lagrangian method, which tracks particles. When oil particles are released into the sea, they move along distinct paths influenced by the prevailing winds and currents (Keramea et al., 2022). Several attempts have been made to simulate the movement and fate of oil spills in real and hypothetical accidents.

Modes of Operation and Forcing in Oil Spill Modeling: State-of-Art, Deficiencies and Challenges

“…Since GNOME can integrate any ocean-circulation and meteorologic model that supports forecasts in various file formats, as well as observational data, NOAA has created the GNOME Operational Oceanographic Data Server (https://gnome.orr.noaa.gov/goods, accessed on 10 April 2023), a publicly accessible system that provides access to all available driver models and data sources. Moreover, GNOME has been applied in many regions over the latest years, such as Indonesia [63], the Gulf of Suez in Egypt [64], offshore Odisha in India [65], and the Red Sea in Egypt [66].…”

“…Further details on model description and verification can be found in the works of Ehard et al [89], Haiden et al [90], and Hersbach et al [91]. ERA5 has been used as wind boundary forcing in various oil-spill scenarios, as in Zhang et al [78], Abdallah and Chantsev [64,66], Davis Morales et al [46], and Liu et al [92]. In parallel, in the case of simulating retrospective oil spills, the ERA-Interim dataset could be used [93]; this is a global reanalysis data product covering the data-rich period since 1979.…”

“…The system employs the Met Office Unified Model v10.6 atmosphere configuration (at 40 km resolution) that is hourly coupled to NEMO v3.4 [121] ocean configuration and the CICE v4.1 multithickness category sea-ice model (both on the ORCA025 grid) [122]. The GLO-CPL dataset has been used as forcing input in the GNOME oil-spill simulations of Abdallah and Chantsev [66] for the Red Sea.…”