Abstract
Oil extraction platforms are potential sources of oil spills. For this reason, an oil spill forecasting system was set up to support the management of emergencies from the oil fields in the Italian seas. The system provides ready-to-use products to the relevant response agencies and optimizes the anti-pollution resources by assessing hazards and risks related to this issue. The forecasting system covers seven working oil platforms in the Sicily Channel and middle/low Adriatic Sea. It is composed of a numerical chain involving nested ocean models from regional to coastal spatial scales and an oil spill model. The system provides two online services, one automatic and a second dedicated to possible real emergencies or exercises on risk preparedness and responding. The automatic service produces daily short-term simulations of hypothetical oil spill dispersion, transport, and weathering processes from each extraction platform. Products, i.e., risk maps, animations, and a properly called bulletin, are available on a dedicated web-portal. The hazard estimations are computed by performing geo-statistical analysis on the daily forecasts database. The second service is activated in near-real-time producing oil spill simulations for the following 48 h.
Highlights
The success of oil spill mitigation actions is closely dependent on the time necessary to detect the slick and predict its fate, in order to permit governmental response agencies in planning and providing a specific and timely intervention at sea
An oil spill forecasting system was set up to support the management of emergencies from the oil fields in the Italian seas
The oil slick detection can be done in situ or by satellite, while its forecast is usually performed through more or less complex systems of numerical simulation with the application of empirical and semi-empirical algorithms, or the estimate of a surface water masses path starting from the intensity of winds [1,2,3,4,5,6]
Summary
The success of oil spill mitigation actions is closely dependent on the time necessary to detect the slick and predict its fate (i.e., slick displacement and dispersion), in order to permit governmental response agencies in planning and providing a specific and timely intervention at sea. The oil slick detection can be done in situ or by satellite, while its forecast is usually performed through more or less complex systems of numerical simulation with the application of empirical and semi-empirical algorithms, or the estimate of a surface water masses path starting from the intensity of winds [1,2,3,4,5,6]. NSepsesc,ifaincadllyr,estphoenfsiers,tbuprtioforictuy siisngonon the management of oil spill events at sea.
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