Review
State of the art review and future directions in oil spill modeling

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.marpolbul.2017.01.001Get rights and content

Highlights

Review of current state-of-the-art in spill modeling, with focus on the period from 2000 to present

  • Overview of basic structure of spill models and use of Lagrangian elements (LEs)

  • Summary of lessons learned and guiding principles for development of spill models

  • Advancements in entrainment and unified oil droplet size modeling

  • Future directions using discrete Lagrangian elements (LE) to model spill transport and fate

Abstract

A review of the state of the art in oil spill modeling, focused on the period from 2000 to present is provided. The review begins with an overview of the current structure of spill models and some lessons learned from model development and application and then provides guiding principles that govern the development of the current generation of spill models. A review of the basic structure of spill models, and new developments in specific transport and fate processes; including surface and subsurface transport, spreading, evaporation, dissolution, entrainment and oil droplet size distributions, emulsification, degradation, and sediment oil interaction are presented. The paper concludes with thoughts on future directions in the field with a primary focus on advancements in handling interactions between Lagrangian elements.

Introduction

State of the art reviews of oil spill models have been performed approximately every 5 to 10 yrs. over the past two decades providing insight into the evolution of spill models and their use in supporting spill response and impact assessment (Huang, 1983, Spaulding, 1988, ASCE, 1996, Reed et al., 1999, NRC, 2003, Afenyo et al., 2015). Recently Spaulding et al. (2012) have performed a review to support the development of the next generation of spill model for the US Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM). NOAA has also undertaken a review and is developing the next version of General NOAA Operational Modeling Environment/Automated Data Inquiry for Oil Spills (GNOME/ADIOS) in support of spill response. The field has matured to the extent that textbooks are beginning to emerge on Lagrangian modeling techniques that include applications to oil spills (Lynch et al., 2015).

The objective of the present paper is to provide a brief review of the current state of development of oil spill models and a sense of future directions. The review focuses on some highlights of recent developments but is not comprehensive given space limitation. The review begins with an overview of the fundamental structure of spill models (Section 2) and lessons learned in the development and application of models over the past decade (Section 3). A review of transport and fate processes included in the models is provided in Section 4. Future directions in spill modeling are provided in Section 5, Conclusions and Summary in Section 6, and references in Section 7. The review mentions modifications to address oil ice interactions and modeling of blowouts but does not provide a review in these areas. The reader interested in modeling of blowouts might wish to review the results of an inter-comparison study of the most recent generation of blowout models performed on behalf of the American Petroleum Institute (API), through the Joint Industry Task Force, D3 Subsea Dispersant Injection Modeling Team for a selected series of test cases and summarized in Socolofsky et al. (2015).

Section snippets

Structure of current generation of oil spill models

A review of the current generation of spill models (Oil Spill Contingency and. Response Model or OSCAR (Reed et al., 2000), Spill Impact Model Application Package/Oil Modeling Application Package or SIMAP/OILMAP (French McCay et al., 2015, Spaulding et al., 1992), GNOME/ADIOS (Lehr et al., 1992, Lehr et al., 2000, Lehr et al., 2002, Zelenke et al., 2012a, Zelenke et al., 2012b), and others) shows that the basic structure is essentially formulated using Lagrangian based methods (Lynch et al.,

Lessons learned and guiding principles

Based on a review of the development and application of oil spill models for spill response, impact assessment, including model validation against every major oil spill in the world, some important lessons in the design of spill model have been learned. These include:

  • Spill models are typically structured as an integrated series of algorithms describing individual fate and transport processes. It is best to have each fate process as a separate algorithm with supporting data provided from other

Oil transport and fate models

Following the basic framework outlined above, a review of advances in spill modeling for the transport and fate processes are provided below. Transport may be either at the surface or subsurface. The principal fate processes of interest are: spreading, evaporation, entrainment (and oil droplet size formation), emulsification, dissolution, biodegradation, photo-oxidation, and sediment oil interaction (Fig. 1). Spill models employ a Lagrangian particle (element or spillet) based strategy to

Selected future directions in spill modeling

Presented below are some thoughts on future directions in spill modeling. Given space limitations, two ideas are articulated that will address fundamental problems within the framework that is employed by many existing spill models. The first is focused on how spreading is handled with LEs and the second on predictions of oil transport using random walk methods.

Summary and conclusions

The review has found that the structure of spill models based on tracking Lagrangian elements (LEs) to represent the surface oil (lots of oil, spillets) and subsurface oil (droplets) continues to be the method most often used. The fate processes are then employed to predict the transfer of oil from one environmental compartment to another (evaporation transfers oil from the sea surface to the atmosphere, entrainment transports oil from the sea surface to the water column, etc.) or the change in

Acronyms

    ADCP

    acoustic Doppler current profiler

    ADROP

    oil particle aggregate model

    AL1-AL8

    aliphatic compounds (insoluble, high molecular weight)

    AR1-AR9

    aromatic compounds (soluble and semi-soluble, low molecular weight)

    ASA RPS Group

    Applied Science Associates, RPS Group

    API

    American Petroleum Institute

    BOT

    Black Oil Table

    BTEX

    Benzene, Toluene, Ethylbenzene, and Xylenes

    BSEE

    Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement

    BOEM

    Bureau of Ocean Energy Management

    EDS

    Environmental Data Server

    DOSS

    diocytl sodium sulfosuccinate

Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by a contract awarded to RPS-Applied Science Associates (ASA) by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) for a project entitled: Simulation Modeling of Ocean Circulation and Oil Spills in the Gulf of Mexico, under contract Number M11PS00019. The manuscript benefitted greatly from an in depth review performed by Zhengkai Li, ASA/RPS Associate. The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the author and should not be interpreted as

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