An Operational Marine Oil Spill Forecasting Tool for the Management of Emergencies in the Italian Seas

Abstract

Oil extraction platforms are potential sources of oil spills. For this reason, an oil spill forecasting system was set up to support the management of emergencies from the oil fields in the Italian seas. The system provides ready-to-use products to the relevant response agencies and optimizes the anti-pollution resources by assessing hazards and risks related to this issue. The forecasting system covers seven working oil platforms in the Sicily Channel and middle/low Adriatic Sea. It is composed of a numerical chain involving nested ocean models from regional to coastal spatial scales and an oil spill model. The system provides two online services, one automatic and a second dedicated to possible real emergencies or exercises on risk preparedness and responding. The automatic service produces daily short-term simulations of hypothetical oil spill dispersion, transport, and weathering processes from each extraction platform. Products, i.e., risk maps, animations, and a properly called bulletin, are available on a dedicated web-portal. The hazard estimations are computed by performing geo-statistical analysis on the daily forecasts database. The second service is activated in near-real-time producing oil spill simulations for the following 48 h.

Marine and Coastal Hazard Assessment for Three Coastal Oil Rigs

“…For what concerns the Sicily Channel platforms, the numerical oceanographic model is based on the Princeton Ocean Model (POM; Blumberg and Mellor, 1987) implementation in the Sicily Channel and Tyrrhenian sea, fully described in Ribotti et al (2019). This implementation is the evolution of the oceanographic prediction tool already validated and described in Olita et al (2007), Sorgente et al (2011), Olita et al (2012b), and Fazioli et al (2016.…”

“…In the operational implementation (functional to the project objectives), daily 5 − days forecasts are produced and hourly fields are stored to feed the oil slick module (MEDSLIK-II, De Dominicis et al, 2013a,b). Forty-eight hours long forecasts of oil spill fate (dispersion and weathering processes) are then produced using standard oil types, location and quantities fully described in Ribotti et al (2019).…”

“…On the other hand, the standalone implementation of the system allowed to perform longer simulation of oil dispersion by using daily hydrodynamic fields, which were in turn produced by a 1 − year long hindcast. In this implementation the model received surface forcing from a set of 1st day atmospheric forecasts, the same used for the operational implementation and described in Ribotti et al (2019), while boundaries data consisted in the Analyses (i.e., simulations assimilating observations) of the Mediterranean Forecasting System (MFS, Tonani et al, 2009) retrieved via the Copernicus Marine Environment Monitoring Service. Based on the daily outputs, 7 − days long oil dispersion simulations have been performed with a frequency of 15 days for the entire year, then obtaining twenty four 7 − days long simulations for each extraction platform.…”

“…So, we opted for such a compromise (i.e., a short forecast for operational system and a longer run for the standalone simulation) in order to estimate the three proposed indices. Simulated oil initial conditions were the same as described in Ribotti et al (2019). For what concerns the system for the Adriatic platform, the only differences with the Sicilian implementation stand in the numerical model providing the hydrodynamics fields forcing the lagrangian oil module; for the Adriatic oil rigs the outputs of the above cited MFS, in its last version at 1/24 of degree of resolution, were used to drive the oil spill model.…”

The Role of Detailed Geomorphic Variability in the Vulnerability Assessment of Potential Oil Spill Events on Mixed Sand and Gravel Beaches: The Cases of Two Adriatic Sites

“…At the scale of the Adriatic Sea, the SHAPE project built an atlas as a tool for storing, visualizing and managing data useful to implement the Integrated Coastal Zone Management (ICZM) and Maritime Spatial Planning (MSP) policies, among which the oil spill vulnerability assessment is also present 1 . An oil spill forecasting system was set up for seven specific oil platforms in the Italian seas by Ribotti et al (2019), including three sites in the Adriatic Sea. In the Adriatic Sea there is also the oil platform closest to the coast (Sarago Mare platform), which is also 30 km SE from the study area of the present paper.…”