Abstract
The Baltic Sea is a unique and sensitive brackish-water ecosystem vulnerable to damage from shipping activities. Despite high levels of maritime safety in the area, there is a continued risk of oil spills and associated harmful environmental impacts. Achieving common situational awareness between oil spill response decision makers and other actors, such as merchant vessel and Vessel Traffic Service center operators, is an important step to minimizing detrimental effects. This paper presents the Next-Generation Smart Response Web (NG-SRW), a web-based application to aid decision making concerning oil spill response. This tool aims to provide, dynamically and interactively, relevant information on oil spills. By integrating the analysis and visualization of dynamic spill features with the sensitivity of environmental elements and value of human uses, the benefits of potential response actions can be compared, helping to develop an appropriate response strategy. The oil spill process simulation enables the response authorities to judge better the complexity and dynamic behavior of the systems and processes behind the potential environmental impact assessment and thereby better control the oil combat action.
Highlights
Accident statistics indicate a high level of maritime safety in the Baltic Sea, and, while accidents typically result in minor consequences in terms of oil pollution [1,3], risks of major oil spills remain both in open water [4,5] and during winter [6,7], for example, the spill caused by the Runner-4 accident in 2006 [8], which led to large oil patches drifting into the shallow waters around Tallinn with detrimental ecological and economic consequences
This study introduces the Next-Generation Smart Response Web (NG-SRW) tool in order to alleviate the limitations of existing Decision support systems (DSS) for oil spill response planning—with particular focus in the Gulf of Finland
Seatrack Web uses that info with real-time weather data to predict oil spill trajectory in the marine environment and inform the user where an oil spill could spread in the coming hours through the NG-SRW application
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. As a new generation of DSS for oil spill response operations and similar systems, the WITOIL DSS is based on environmental monitoring, state-of-the-art oil drift modelling, and innovative technology platforms. It is an innovative, web-based tool based on MEDSLIK-II oil spill code coupled with the operational oceanographic and atmospheric services and has been implemented to support emergency organization in the case of oil spill accidents in the Mediterranean Sea [22]. We examined state of the NG-SRW development, its scientific basis, conceptual framework, implementation, and future development
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