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Applications of an Oil Drift and Fate Model for Fairway Design

  • Chapter
Preventive Methods for Coastal Protection

Abstract

Pollutants at sea undergo weathering related changes in the composition and are transported by winds, waves and currents. Methods are needed to study the impact of changing weather and ocean conditions on oil chemistry and physics and to estimate all the driving forces of oil transport at sea. The present study highlights the potential of operational oil drift and fate models for the analysis of systematic drift patterns that has been prevented so far by their numerical complexity. A large number of drift simulations are performed to cover a three years period 1992–1994, with 8 releases per month on a grid of 528 release positions in the Gulf of Finland. Although sparse in resolution, the results are still characteristic. Large-scale wind induced drift has been found to dominate the surface transport during windy seasons, and to be of similar magnitude as the current drift during calm seasons. Currents dominate the subsurface transport regime, and become more and more significant at later stages of the spill development, when more and more oil droplets are mixed down by waves. To estimate the combined effects of oil transport and oil weathering, seasonal drift patterns are analysed and alternative fairway designs are derived using a Monte Carlo technique. The quality of the designs is evaluated under environmental and economical viewpoints using professional ship routing software. We demonstrate that it is possible to find balanced solutions that are economically beneficial and that follow green goals like low fuel consumption and reduced risk for coastal oil pollution. Wave-driven advection of oil spills has been studied for the one-year period of 1992, to cover a seasonal cycle. It has been found to impact oil propagation in areas where the wave field exhibits strong gradients, e.g., at locations with depth gradients and in the wind shadow of islands.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    HIROMB is an abbreviation for High Resolution Oceanographic Model for the Baltic. As the name suggests, it is a circulation model with high resolution intended to be used for the Baltic Sea (e.g., Funkquist 2001). BOOS stands for the Baltic Operational Oceanographic System.

  2. 2.

    Currents and winds drive oil advection and affect oil chemistry and physics in sea water.

  3. 3.

    Ensemble averages are not appropriate, because some of the particles travel for a long time, especially while submerged and solely current driven. Ensemble minima are problematic as well. They often represent nothing more than the drift geometry and the shortest distances to the coast.

  4. 4.

    This notion is used here to denote the Eastern, Northern and Western Gotland Basin, Bornholm Basin and Gdańsk Bay (cf. Chap. 2, Fig. 2.1).

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Acknowledgements

The underlying studies were performed in the framework of the BalticWay project, in which the DMI was jointly supported by the funding from the Danish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Higher Education and the European Commission’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP 2007–2013) under grant agreement No. 217246 made with the joint Baltic Sea research and development programme BONUS. The models were run using meteorological forcing kindly provided by the Danish Climate Centre (DKC).

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  1. Danish Meteorological Institute, Lyngbyvej 100, 2100, Copenhagen E, Denmark

    Jens Murawski & Jacob Woge Nielsen

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  1. Jens Murawski
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Correspondence to Jens Murawski .

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  1. Inst. Cybernetics, Laboratory of Wave Engineering, Tallinn University of Technology, Akadeemia Tee 21, Tallinn, 12618, Estonia

    Tarmo Soomere

  2. Inst. Cybernetics, Laboratory of Wave Engineering, Tallinn University of Technology, Akadeemia Tee 21, Tallinn, 12618, Estonia

    Ewald Quak

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Murawski, J., Woge Nielsen, J. (2013). Applications of an Oil Drift and Fate Model for Fairway Design. In: Soomere, T., Quak, E. (eds) Preventive Methods for Coastal Protection. Springer, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-00440-2_11

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