The DeepWater Horizon Oil Slick: Simulations of River Front Effects and Oil Droplet Size Distribution
by
Lars Robert Hole 1,*
, Knut-Frode Dagestad 1,†, Johannes Röhrs 1,†, Cecilie Wettre 1,†, Vassiliki H. Kourafalou 2,†, Yannis Androulidakis 2,†, Heesook Kang 2,†, Matthieu Le Hénaff 3,4,† and Oscar Garcia-Pineda 5,†
Lars Robert Hole 1,*, Knut-Frode Dagestad 1,†, Johannes Röhrs 1,†, Cecilie Wettre 1,†, Vassiliki H. Kourafalou 2,†, Yannis Androulidakis 2,†, Heesook Kang 2,†, Matthieu Le Hénaff 3,4,† and Oscar Garcia-Pineda 5,†
1
Norwegian Meteorological Institute, Allegt. 70, 5007 Bergen, Norway
2
Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, University of Miami, Miami, FL 33149, USA
3
Cooperative Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Studies, University of Miami, Miami, FL 33149, USA
4
NOAA Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory, Miami, FL 33149, USA
5
WaterMapping, Gulf Breeze, FL 32563, USA
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
†
These authors contributed equally to this work.
J. Mar. Sci. Eng. 2019, 7(10), 329; https://doi.org/10.3390/jmse7100329
Received: 28 July 2019 / Revised: 10 September 2019 / Accepted: 18 September 2019 / Published: 22 September 2019
(This article belongs to the Section Physical Oceanography)
The effect of river fronts on oil slick transport has been shown using high resolution forcing models and a fully fledged oil drift model, OpenOil. The model was used to simulate two periods of the 2010 DeepWater Horizon oil spill. Metocean forcing data were taken from the data-assimilative GoM-HYCOM 1/50° ocean model with realistic daily river input and global forecast products of wind and wave parameters from ECMWF. The simulations were initialized from satellite observations of the surface oil patch. The effect of using a newly developed parameterization for oil droplet size distribution was studied and compared to a traditional algorithm. Although the algorithms provide different distributions for a single wave breaking event, it was found that the net difference after long simulations is negligible, indicating that the outcome is robust regarding the choice of parameterization. The effect of removing the river outflow was investigated to showcase effects of river induced fronts on oil spreading. A consistent effect on the amount and location of stranded oil and a considerable impact on the location of the surface oil patch were found. During a period with large river outflow (20–27 May 2010), the total amount of stranded oil is reduced by about 50% in the simulation with no river input. The results compare well with satellite observations of the surface oil patch after simulating the surface oil patch drift for 7–8 days.
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Keywords:
HYCOM; OpenDrift; OpenOil; oil spill; modeling; simulations; satellite; observations; river fronts; DeepWater Horizon
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MDPI and ACS Style
Hole, L.R.; Dagestad, K.-F.; Röhrs, J.; Wettre, C.; Kourafalou, V.H.; Androulidakis, Y.; Kang, H.; Le Hénaff, M.; Garcia-Pineda, O. The DeepWater Horizon Oil Slick: Simulations of River Front Effects and Oil Droplet Size Distribution. J. Mar. Sci. Eng. 2019, 7, 329.
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