Oil Spills in Coastal Zones: Predicting Slick Transport and Weathering Processes

Abstract

This paper presents some considerations about environmental consequences of the spills and also about oil spill detection and control. Afterwards, it presents a computational structure that has been developed to forecast the time-space evolution of oil spills in marine environments. This structure was developed based on widely used mathematical formulations for oil spreading and weathering processes. It uses depth-averaged currents obtained from a two-dimensional and/or a quasi-three-dimensional hydrodynamic model, and net wave velocities obtained analytically. A Lagrangian transport model or, alternatively, a Eulerian transport model is used to predict the oil slick transport and spread. General characteristics of the computational structure and the results of its application to two real case studies - the “Cercal” accident on October 1994, and the “New World” tanker accident on December 1994 - are presented. Comparisons of numerical results with measured data are shown and a brief discussion about the computational structure performance is also presented.