Modeling of oil spill beaching along the coast of the Bohai Sea, China

Abstract

On June 4 and 17, 2011, two separate oil spill accidents occurred at platforms B and C of the Penglai 19-3 oilfield located in the Bohai Sea, China. Based on the initial oil spill locations detected from the first available Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) image acquired on June 11, 2011, we performed a numerical experiment to simulate the potential oil spill beaching area with the General NOAA Operational Modeling Environment (GNOME) model. The model was driven by ocean surface currents from an operational ocean model (Navy Coastal Ocean Model) and surface winds from operational scatterometer measurements (the Advanced Scatterometer). Under the forcing of wind and ocean currents, some of the oil spills reached land along the coast of Qinhuangdao within 12 days. The results also demonstrate that the ocean currents are likely to carry the remaining oil spills along the Bohai coast towards the northeast. The predicted oil spill beaching area was verified by reported in-situ measurements and former studies based on MODIS observations.

Keywords

oil spill / Bohai Sea / trajectory / GNOME / SAR

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