Improving Oil Spill predictions near shore and across the bay/coastal interface

Summary

The goal of this project is to build the next level of science and modeling into the GLO oil spill modeling system. The key challenge is the complex flow fields driven by tidal exchanges that affect the fate of spilled oil transport near the shoreline. The behavior of small-scale eddies and coherent vortices at tidal inlets can control whether offshore-spilled oil is ingested into a bay, or bay-spilled oil is expelled into coastal shelf waters, Furthermore, the interactions of the offshore currents with tidal eddies will affect the coastal transport. The existing GLO and TWDB modeling system cannot capture these near shore processes, so oil transport predictions across the interface between bay and coastal models are not reliable.