STATISTICAL ESTIMATES OF SHORELINE OIL CONTACT IN THE GULF OF MEXICO

Abstract

ABSTRACT As steward of the Federal offshore lands known as the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS), the U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI), Minerals Management Service (MMS), is responsible for balancing the Nation's search for commercial oil and gas with protection of the human and marine environments. The MMS regulates the development of mineral resources in an environmentally safe manner by analyzing environmental consequences of the OCS program prior to lease sales or approval of industry's plans. The Oil-Spill Risk Analysis (OSRA) model was developed by the DOI for the analysis of possible oil-spill impact from offshore oil and gas operations. The OSRA model produces statistical estimates of hypothetical oil-spill occurrence and contact from projected OCS operations. The model generates an ensemble of sea surface oil-spill trajectories by initiating thousands of oil-spill simulations at hypothetical spill locations to statistically characterize oil-spill risk in areas of prospective drilling and production and along projected pipeline routes. The hypothetical spills are initiated every day and move at the velocity of the vector sum of the surface ocean currents plus an empirical wind-induced drift of speed equal to 3.5% of the local wind speed, with a wind-speed-dependent direction (Samuels et al., 1982). The model generates oil-spill trajectories by integrating interpolated values of the wind and ocean current fields at intervals short enough to use the full spatial resolution of the ocean current and wind fields. The OSRA model, as applied to the Gulf of Mexico, uses 3-hourly ocean current fields over 7 years (1993–1999) generated by the Princeton Regional Ocean Forecast System (PROFS) (Oey et al., 2004). The PROFS is driven by synoptic winds, heat flux, and river flows. The wind field is based on the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts surface winds enhanced by observations from meteorological buoys and Coastal-Marine Automated Network stations. The same wind field used to force the ocean model is used to move the oil in the spill trajectories. As an example of environmental assessment, the OSRA model was used to estimate the spreading of oil spills by simultaneously modeling fractions of each spill, referred to as spillets. The spillets were used to calculate additional statistics, in particular, the length of coastline contacted by a large spill. The coastline was divided into equal length segments. Assumptions were made regarding what fraction of the spill (i.e., the number of spillets) that contacted a land segment would constitute a contact larger than the “level of concern.” Sensitivity of the analysis to key assumed parameters, such as the number of spillets and the level of concern, were tested.