This study confirms that the entrainment of oil and the breakup into droplets are separate processes governed by separate parameters that can and should be included in spilled oil fate modelling. The results presented demonstrate that in most conditions, entrainment…
Abstract: Characteristics of laboratory-scale bubble-driven buoyant plumes in a stably stratified quiescent fluid are studied using large-eddy simulation (LES). As a bubble plume entrains stratified ambient water, its net buoyancy decreases due to the increasing density difference between the entrained and ambient fluids.…
Application of chemical dispersants or mechanical dispersion on surface oil is a trade-off between surface effects (impact of floating oil) and sub-surface effects (impact of suspended oil). Making an informed decision regarding such response, requires insight in the induced change…
Fossils of marine microorganisms such as planktic foraminifera are among the cornerstones of palaeoclimatological studies. It is often assumed that the proxies derived from their shells represent ocean conditions above the location where they were deposited. Planktic foraminifera, however, are…
This study quantifies the effect of oil layer thickness on entrainment and dispersion of oil into seawater, using a plunging jet with a camera system. In contrast to what is generally assumed, we revealed that for the low viscosity “surrogate…
The Texas A&M Oilspill Calculator (TAMOC) is a new, freely available modeling suite for predicting fate and transport of oil and gas released from subsea accidents. The model is coded in Python and Fortran and is freely available from http://github.com/socolofs/tamoc.…
A new study that explores various models of oil spill and dispersant projections has been published in Marine Pollution Bulletin. The study, conducted by Texas A&M and others, developed models that tested 14 cases of accidental oil well blowouts. The…
Simulating the effects of droplet size, high pressure biodegradation, and variable flow rate on the subsea evolution of deep plumes from the Macondo blowout In a recent study by C-IMAGE researchers from the University of Miami and the Technical University…
Evolution of the Macondo Well Blowout: Simulating the Effects of the Circulation and synthetic Dispersants on the Subsea Oil Transport, Environmental Science and Technology During the Deepwater Horizon incident, crude oil flowed into the Gulf of Mexico from 1522 m…
Connectivity Modeling System: A probabilistic modeling tool for the multi-scale tracking of biotic and abiotic variability in the ocean Pelagic organisms' movement and motion of buoyant particles are driven by processes operating across multiple, spatial and temporal scales. We developed…
