Abstract
The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of the wind drift factor under strong tidal conditions in the western coastal area of Korea on the movement of oil slicks caused by the Hebei Spirit oil spill accident in 2007. The movement of oil slicks was computed using a simple simulation model based on the empirical formula as a function of surface current, wind speed, and the wind drift factor. For the simulation, the Environmental Fluid Dynamics Code (EFDC) model and Automatic Weather System (AWS) were used to generate tidal and wind fields respectively. Simulation results were then compared with 5 sets of spaceborne optical and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data. From the present study, it was found that highest matching rate between the simulation results and satellite imagery was obtained with different values of the wind drift factor, and to first order, this factor was linearly proportional to the wind speed. Based on the results, a new modified empirical formula was proposed for forecasting the movement of oil slicks on the coastal area.
Highlights
IntroductionOil spills in coastal waters seriously affect the ecological system, fisheries, and the economy
Among maritime environmental disasters, oil spills in coastal waters seriously affect the ecological system, fisheries, and the economy
Considering the general trend of the previous results [18], [28] together with our result, it appears certain that there is an increasing trend of wind drift factor with increasing wind speed, and Figure 10 and improved accuracy can be justified as a preliminary result. These results suggest that matching rates are influenced, to some extent, by wind drift factor in the study area characterized with strong tidal currents
Summary
Oil spills in coastal waters seriously affect the ecological system, fisheries, and the economy. Since several early experiments using floating plastic cards and visual observation [2], [3], a substantial number of studies have been reported on predicting the movement of oil spills, including advection, spreading, dispersion and evaporation [4], [5], [6], [7], [8], [9], [10], [11], [12], [13] These models are relatively complex, requiring exact information on the environmental conditions such as winds, currents, waves, turbulence, salinity, temperature, and solar insolation for the accurate simulation of movement of oil slicks. The movement of oil slicks can be predicted, to first order, by this simple empirical formula if the current and wind fields are known
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