Decision Making Support Tools

Ocean Imaging's current aerial thickness mapping system has been deployed during oil spills in California and during the response to the Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico. For this to occur in other U.S. geographic areas the technology needed to be tested and validated under other oceanographic and environmental conditions. The existing system was developed and operationally tested under temperate sea and atmospheric conditions with reasonable water clarity. Many geographic regions with oil and gas activities experience conditions outside of this realm.

This project aimed to validate and improve the two correlation models using a well know oil spill model OILMAP, by adding crude oils from outside the GOM for which physical and chemical properties are available, introducing ten new crude oils from the GOM for which physical and chemical properties were measured in this study, considering existing data from large tank tests and field trials/spills, and using data from new small tank tests.