Oil Spills in Coastal Zones: Predicting Slick Transport and Weathering Processes

This paper presents some considerations about environmental consequences of the spills and also about oil spill detection and control. Afterwards, it presents a computational structure that has been developed to forecast the time-space evolution of oil spills in marine environments. This structure was developed based on widely used mathematical formulations for oil spreading and weathering processes. It uses depth-averaged currents obtained from a two-dimensional and/or a quasi-three-dimensional hydrodynamic model, and net wave velocities obtained analytically. A Lagrangian transport model or, alternatively, a Eulerian transport model is used to predict the oil slick transport and spread. General characteristics of the computational structure and the results of its application to two real case studies the “Cercal” accident on October 1994, and the “New World” tanker accident on December 1994 are presented. Comparisons of numerical results with measured data are shown and a brief discussion about the computational structure performance is also presented.