Marine oil spill simulation and uncertainty analysis - a case study in the Newfoundland offshore area

• Main Author: Zheng, Xiao
• Format: Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: Memorial University of Newfoundland 2017
• Subjects: Newfoundland
• Online Access: https://research.library.mun.ca/12820/; https://research.library.mun.ca/12820/1/thesis.pdf

Oil spills have been regarded as one of the major contributors to marine pollution. With the rapidly changing environmental conditions and the diverse uncertainties in the data associated with the observation or meteorological and oceanographic data, the simulation of an oil spill is challenging to be accurate and reliable enough for supporting response management. Furthermore, with the different assumptions, structures and translations of various simulation models, results could significantly vary even with the same inputs. The objectives of this research are therefore 1) to compare three widely used models for offshore oil spill simulation and evaluate their capabilities under harsh environmental conditions; and 2) to develop a Design of Experiment (DOE) based approach for analyzing uncertainties associated with the spill modeling input and parameters to help improve offshore oil spill simulation. In this research, the Terra Nova oil spill occurred on November 21, 2004, the largest oil spill in offshore Newfoundland, was chosen as a case study. The models, namely GNOME/ADIOS2 and OSCAR, were employed for the simulation of fate and transport of the spilled oil. During the simulation, ocean currents data from the Hybrid Coordinate Ocean Model (HYCOM) and surface wind data measured by the National Climate Data Center (NCDC) were used. The simulation results indicated that 43.7% of the spilled oil evaporated or dispersed in the first two days. With the model of OSCAR, 87.4% of the total spilled oil was evaporated or dispersed, while 10.8% was biodegraded. Only 1.6% of oil remained on the sea surface after six days, which agreed well with the historical data. The results from GNOME showed a more reasonable match with the observations from the RADARSAT-1 satellite images regarding the spill plume, shape and location as compared to those from OSCAR. But on the other hand, OSCAR showed better performance in simulating weathering process. To facilitate a better understanding of the oil fate and transport, and to ...