Operational Oceanograhy System for Oil Spill Risk Management at Santander Bay (Spain)

Estuaries and bays are sheltered areas that usually host a wide range of industry and interests (e.g. aquaculture, fishing, recreation, habitat protection). Oil spill risk assessment in these environments is fundamental given the reduced response time associated to this very local scale. This work presents a system comprising two modules: (1) an Operational Oceanography System (OOS) based on nesting high resolution models which provides short-term (within 48 hours) oil spill trajectory forecasting and (2) an oil spill risk assessment system (OSRAS) that estimates risk as the combination of hazard and vulnerability. Hazard is defined as the probability of the coast to be polluted by an oil spill and is calculated on the basis of a library of pre-run cases.

The OOS is made up by: (1) Daily boundary conditions (sea level, ocean currents, salinity and temperature) and meteorological forcing are obtained from the European network MYOCEAN and from the Spanish met office, AEMET, respectively; (2) COAWST modelling system is the engine of the OOS (at this stage of the project only ROMS is on); (3) an oil spill transport and fate model, TESEO (4) a web service that manages the operational system and allows the user to run hypothetical as well as real oil spill trajectories using the daily forecast of wind and high resolution ocean variables carried out by COAWST.

Regarding the OSRAS system, the main contributions of this work are: (1) the use of extensive meteorological and oceanographic database provided by state-of-the-art ocean and atmospheric models, (2) the use of clustering techniques to establish representative met-ocean scenarios (i.e. combination of sea state, meteorological conditions, tide and river flow), (3) dynamic downscaling of the met-ocean scenarios with COAWST modelling system and (4) management of hundreds of runs performed with the state-of-the-art oil spill transport model TESEO.