Hindcast of oil spill pollution in the East China Sea in January 2018

Abstract

In this study, an integrated model is developed for studying the Sanchi oil spill event, which occurred in the East China Sea in January 2018. The results of the Advanced Research Weather Research and Forecasting model (WRF-ARW) as well as the Princeton Ocean Model (POM) are used for meteorological forecasting and the hydrodynamic simulations, respectively. These data are adopted as inputs for the OpenOil, a sub-module of OpenDrift, for the oil spill model. Some reference experiments are examined for short-term hindcast. The satellite image is used to validate the numerical result. The oil slicks of the satellite image and the numerical result are of similar shapes. Quantitatively, the simulated oil slick and that from the satellite image are located closely and have similar dimensions of 56 km by 34 km and 54 km by 29 km, respectively. It is found that the accurate results can be obtained by the proposed integrated model with the high-frequency (hourly) and high-spatial-resolution data as inputs, and the wind drift factor has to be added. The long-term 1-month simulation showed that most of the oil particles would move to the northeast of the sinking location and be trapped by the Kuroshio current.