Oil spill modeling

Abstract

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.

The Implications of Oil Exploration off the Gulf Coast of Florida

“…As mentioned previously, in the years following the Deepwater Horizon oil spill there was a significant increase in the amount of work being done in the oil spill risk and impact modeling area [17]. There are three major families of analysis: (1) vulnerability analysis, (2) risk analysis, and (3) normative impact modeling.…”

“…To be sure, while the number of oil spill impact assessments has increased dramatically since the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe [17], none have quantified or directly addressed the potential outcomes of a disaster in the Eastern GOM Planning Area. This is not to say that site-specific research is nonexistent.…”

“…With recent proposals to open the GOM Eastern Planning Area to oil exploration and production, the purpose of this paper is to develop a broad understanding of the risks and impacts associated with drilling in the Eastern GOM. We apply the core methodological procedures found across many oil spill risk and impact methodologies (e.g., [17]) to the Eastern GOM. This process of tracking the final fate of oil, from blowout locations to the shoreline, will provide some insight into the behavior of oil spills in the area along with their potential impacts to the state of Florida and beyond.…”

Marine and Coastal Hazard Assessment for Three Coastal Oil Rigs

“…Oil spill Hazard, subject of the present work, can be assessed in several ways. One of the most popular and effective methods, adopted in the last years for oil spill related issues, is the use of modeling tools (Nelson and Grubesic, 2018, for a recent review) to produce simulated data on which perform statistics for hazard (risk) estimations. Such statistics often just concern the oil densities on coastal elements i.e., the density of stranded oil weighted on a discrete (cells, nodes, coastal stretches) coastal line (e.g., Olita et al, 2012a;Sepp Neves et al, 2015).…”

The Role of Detailed Geomorphic Variability in the Vulnerability Assessment of Potential Oil Spill Events on Mixed Sand and Gravel Beaches: The Cases of Two Adriatic Sites

“…As stated by Aps et al (2014), beaches cannot be simply considered from a statistical point of view, and coastal morphodynamics is an important factor to take into account in the vulnerability assessment for oil spill events. The crucial role of field measurements for evaluating ESI was already recognized by Nelson and Grubesic (2018), as they helped to decrease observational error when only remote sensing data are used. According to González et al (2009), to minimize the impact of oil spill on beaches it is crucial to understand the modal state of the beach and its morphodynamics variability through time; the authors also highlight the importance of the beach limits (lateral and the cross-shore), which confine the water circulation and the oil transport on the beach.…”