DeepWater Horizon Oil Spill

Figure 1:  We’ve starting using some of the Products from the Louisiana Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness.  http://gohsep.la.gov/oilspill.aspx and click on the “Click Here for Google Earth Layer (kmz file).”  The above figure shows the analysis showing the pbserve slick locations for June 23.  The magenta lines are the deep currents from the previous blog posting.

Figure 2.  Here we have the oil slick forecast from Louisiana for today, June 25.  We have excellent HF Radar coverage of the northern end of the slick.  In the HF Radar fields we  see strong currents to the north east on the outer shelf along the shelf break.  Shoreward and west of this jet we see a counterclockwise circulation with currents to the west on the inner shelf off the coast of Alabama and Mississippi.  To the east of this jet we see the opposite rotation, a weaker clockwise cell.

Figure 3:  We also have our students working on producing new KMZ’s for community use.  Here Mike just gave me a new kmz plotting the SABGOM (South Atlantic Bight, Gulf of Mexico) model from Ruoying He at North Carolina State University.  This first google earth map from SABGOM shows the sea surface temperature.  We’ll keep putting together the current vectors and add the kmz to the Deepwater Horizon portal resource list.  http://rucool.marine.rutgers.edu/deepwater/

In this zoom out to show the full model domain, we see the Horizon Marine drifter that left the Gulf of Mexico heading north in the Gulf Stream.

Figure 1:  Thought we should take a look at the deep flow field from the HyCOM model while we wait for the morning update on the satellite imagery.  Here we look at 700 m, plotting temperature as the color fill and currents as the white arrows.  The warm temperatures and circulation of the Loop Current Eddy dominate the middle of the image.  The patterns in between the Loop Current Eddy and the continental shelf are where we focus our attention.  We’ve highlighted two general patterns in the deep flow with hand-drawn magenta arrows.  Near the spill site, a northward flow through the spill region branches off to the east and west.  Along the Florida shelf break, a generally northward flow running all the way from the Loop Current to the norther Gulf is forecast.