Deepwater olie in Atlantische Oceaan

[Cees Binkhorst]

REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl

Het is dus nagenoeg zeker dat de Deepwater olie in de Atlantische Oceaan
zal komen.
De vraag is alleen in welke concentratie.

Toch wel bijzonder dat deze mogelijkheid niet voorkomt in de Amerikaanse
evaluatie. Kop in het zand?

Groet / Cees

Supercomputer oil slick sims predict greasy Atlantic
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/06/07/ncar_oil_slick_sim/
By Timothy Prickett Morgan • Get more from this author
Posted in HPC, 7th June 2010 21:21 GMT

Supercomputers are good for more than just designing nuclear weapons or
making doomsday predictions about climate change. They can depress us in
other ways, like showing us the extent of the damage that could be done
by BP's Deepwater Horizon offshore rig spewing oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

The National Center for Atmospheric Research, which is funded by the US
National Science Foundation to do climate modeling, has borrowed some
computing capacity at the New Mexico Computer Applications Center and
the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, loaded up the Parallel Ocean Program
(a part of the Community Climate System Model simulation created by NCAR
and the US Department of Energy), and dropped some simulated dye in the
simulated Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic Ocean and watched how it disperses
over time.

"I've had a lot of people ask me, 'Will the oil reach Florida?'" Synte
Peacock, one of the NCAR researchers who did the simulation, said in a
report on the early findings released by NCAR. "Actually, our best
knowledge says the scope of this environmental disaster is likely to
reach far beyond Florida, with impacts that have yet to be understood."
NCAR Oil Slick Simulation

The static image of the simulation (above) illustrates where dye had
dispersed – and how densely – 132 days after being released into the
upper 65 feet of the ocean, assuming a continuous spilling of dye at the
same rate and location as the oil from April 20 through June 20. NCAR
researchers warn that the simulated dye in the water has the same
viscosity of water, unlike the oil that is actually spreading through
the Gulf of Mexico.

Oil can clump up and moves in different ways. This simulation, which you
can view in animated form here, does not show how the dye-as-oil-proxy
is moving in the colder depths of the ocean, but NCAR used its ocean
models to simulate the dispersal of dye at six different layers of the
Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic to get a sense of how the oil might
move. (You can view all six simulations here).

The simulations show that once the dye (and hence the oil slick) hits
the Loop Current, a fast-moving, clockwise whirl linking the tip of the
Yucatan Peninsula to the western edge of the Florida Panhandle, it can
quickly run up the Atlantic Coast as far north as Cape Hatteras in North
Carolina before being sucked out into the Atlantic where it disperses
across a wide area. So not only will the BP slick reach Florida, it will
absolutely engulf it. The Loop Current runs at about 40 miles per day,
but the Gulf Stream current in the Atlantic can do 100 miles per day, so
the oil could really move fast once it rounds the Panhandle, heading east.

The BP slick could have a dramatic effect on Europe as well. Martin
Visbeck, of the University of Kiel in Germany, is part of the team
trying to figure that out using these simulations. "Our assumption is
that the enormous lateral mixing in the ocean together with the
biological disintegration of the oil should reduce the pollution to
levels below harmful concentrations." Visbeck explained in the NCAR
statement. "But we would like to have this backed up by numbers from
some of the best ocean models."

While it is wonderful that the United States has the supercomputing
capacity to do such elegant simulations, it is astonishing that such
simulations are not part of the environmental impact statement for such
deep-water rigs and that such simulations have not been tweaked to
simulate hypothetical oil rather than dye, which doesn't necessarily
behave like spilled oil will. The NCAR researchers know this, and they
are aware that oil is subject to breaking down and being eaten by bacteria.

This simulation takes into account normal weather patterns for the time
show and assumes that the oil stops bubbling out of the Deepwater
Horizon's busted pipe on June 20.

Imagine what might happen if the leak continues beyond that date, and
then the hurricanes start coming. The National Oceanographic and
Atmospheric Association has just released its predictions for the
hurricane season, which started on June 1. NOAA is predicting that there
is a 70 per cent chance that there will be 14 to 23 named storms (which
means they have top winds of 39 miles per hour or higher), with 8 to 14
storms qualifying as hurricanes (top winds of 74 miles per hour or
higher) and 3 to 7 being major hurricanes (with winds above 111 miles
per hour).

The NCAR simulations do not take into account what might happen if a
hurricane rips through the Gulf and then ricochets out to the Atlantic
across the Panhandle

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