Abstract
A Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) tanker and a chemical tanker collided two nautical miles off Ennore port on 28 January, 2017. Around 196.4 metric tons (MT) of Heavy Furnace Oil (HFO) was spilled and drifted towards the shore. Oil spill drift advisory and prediction was made by Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Services (INCOIS) using General National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Operational Modeling Environment (GNOME), an oil spill trajectory model. The trajectory model was forced with analysed and forecasted ocean currents from Global Ocean Data Assimilation System (GODAS) based on Modular Ocean Model 4p1 (GM4p1). It was found that spread of HFO obtained from oil spill trajectory model GNOME, has matched well with the observed spread from Sentinel-1A satellite dataset. However, the spread of the HFO was underestimated by the trajectory model, when forced with forecasted GM4p1 currents. Additional ground truth observation from Indian Coast Guard also corroborates this finding.
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Acknowledgements
The authors thank the officials of Indian Coast Guard, Chennai for their information on oil spill and support in validating the trajectory predictions of spilled HFO. Authors acknowledge that the executable of oil spill model GNOME is adopted from NOAA and set up in diagnostic mode for simulating oil spill trajectories of Indian Ocean scenario. Thanks are due to the developers of NOAA GNOME. ArcMap tool was used to plot and generate the trajectory output in native EPS format. Ferret software in Linux environment was used to interpret the SAR data. The authors thank the editor and reviewers for their comments and suggestions in improving the manuscript’s quality. This research paper holds the INCOIS contribution number 314.
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Prasad, S.J., Balakrishnan Nair, T.M., Rahaman, H. et al. An assessment on oil spill trajectory prediction: Case study on oil spill off Ennore Port. J Earth Syst Sci 127, 111 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12040-018-1015-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12040-018-1015-3