Bulletins

Dr. Deborah French McCay (ASA), Chris Galagan (ASA), Eileen Graham (ASA), Dagmar Etkin (ERC) and Mark West (EmergWest) provided a 4-hour workshop on Trajectory Prediction in Oil Spill Response, Environmental Information and Oil Spill Risk Assessment. Click on the links below to download the presentations:

Oil Spill Science and Technologies

Oil Spill Risk Assessments: Processes and Modeling Consequences

Oil Spill Probability Analysis and Applications for Risk Assessment

Guidance for Dispersant Decision Making for Floating Oil: Potential for Impacts on Aquatic Biota

Overview of Workshop:
During a spill, information is essential to support decision-making. Field observations, trajectory predictions, and weather forecasts need to be put together to make a coherent picture of the situation. The course provided an overview of a variety of spill case histories with discussion of the science that governs how spills behave. Observations discussed included overflight maps, beach surveys and simple oceanographic sampling. Different types of trajectory modeling were demonstrated, including working with multiple (stochastic) trajectory simulations, and looking at spills from pipelines, storage tanks, and at river crossings. Workshop attendees learned the basics of how to put together a spill timeline from the past to the present and into the future using field information and predictions, and how to integrate results with GIS applications such as ArcView® and Google Earth.

To be fully prepared for a spill, comprehensive contingency planning and risk assessment is required. A full assessment of oil spill risk considers 1) the likelihood of spills from various sources and causes, 2) the expected frequency distribution of spill sizes if a spill occurs, and 3) the potential consequences of the spilled oil to ecological and socioeconomic resources. The increasing availability of spill incident and environmental data, advancements in spill modeling capabilities, and modern high-speed computing tools allow sophisticated and reliable oil spill risk assessments to be efficiently performed that go well-beyond the traditional worst-case scenario analysis on a handful of hypothetical incidents. ASA and ERC have teamed on numerous oil spill risk studies, developing such quantitative approaches to address questions and issues arising during contingency planning, spill response, regulation development, and planning for natural resource damage assessment. Dr. Deborah French-McCay of ASA provided an overview of the problem and approach; Dr. Dagmar Schmidt Etkin of ERC described techniques and data available to estimate likelihood of spills and expected frequency distribution of spill sizes, as well as modeling techniques to estimate response costs and socioeconomic impacts.

The workshop summarized modeling approaches and results for evaluations of spill consequences for applications ranging from cost-benefit analyses of spill prevention measures and prioritization of risks for policy development, to quantification of environmental salvage rewards. Finally, ASA described development of and demonstrate a new freely-available tool sponsored by Coastal Response Research Center (CRRC) of UNH that provides guidance for oil spill response tradeoff decisions involving dispersant usage by estimating expected level of ecological impact of floating oil and water column contamination.