Basin-Scale and Near-Surface Circulation in the Gulf of Mexico

Abstract

AbstractIn the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon event, GoMRI-funded research consortia carried out several field campaigns in the northern Gulf of Mexico with the objectives of understanding physical processes that influence transport of oil in the ocean and evaluating the accuracy of current-generation ocean models. A variety of new instruments were created to achieve unprecedented levels of dense and overlapping datasets that span five orders of magnitude of spatial and temporal scales. The observational programs: GLAD (DeSoto Canyon, Summer 2012), SCOPE (Destin inner shelf, Winter 2013 14), LASER (DeSoto Canyon, Winter 2016) and SPLASH (Louisiana shelf, Spring 2017) were designed to capture transport by ocean currents that are not presently well resolved by operational models. The overarching objective of these experiments was to collect data from a variety of sensors (drifting, aerial and ship-board) to document the circulation and near-surface variability of fronts, where much of the surface oil tends to be concentrated. Two state-of-the-art models were also run in real-time during all the experiments; a multiply-nested Navy Coastal Ocean Model with horizontal resolutions ranging from 1 km in the outer nest down to 100 m, as well as a fully coupled atmosphere-wave-ocean model. The purpose of this submission is to summarize the advances made in both understanding and modeling the near-surface transport in the Gulf of Mexico.