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Saturday, May 8, 2010

Planning A Beach Vacation This Summer?

The Deepwater Horizon oil spill trajectory hindcast/forecast based on West Florida Shelf ROMS Ocean Circulation Group.  http://ocg6.marine.usf.edu/~liu/Drifters/latest_roms.htm

So last year to use an app to check on your whether your plane will be on time or whether the roads will be crowded.  Now you just need to check to see if you need sun tan oil or whether the beach will provide you some for free!

This is a joint effort of the Ocean Circulation Group and the Optical Oceanography Laboratory at College of Marine Science, University of South Florida to track/predict the Deepwater Horizon (Macondo well, designated by the red circle) oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico using simulated drifters/particles. Drifter trajectories were calculated based on the three-hourly surface currents from the West Florida Shelf ROMS Nowcast/Forecast System of University of South Florida. Virtual particles were released from the sunken rig site every three hours since 05/06/2010 18:00 UTC, assuming continual oil spill from the well. The initial locations of the drifters were taken from satellite remotely sensed oil slick at that time. The particles (difters) are shown as black dots, and their trajectries in magenta. Sea surface temperature (color contours, units in deg C) was superimposed with the surface current vectors to indicate the surface ocean circulation. The velocity data were subsampled every the third grid points in both east and north directions for better visulization.

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