Management and control of potentially calamitous spills rely on the knowledge and understanding of the causes, effects and behaviour of such spills. This requires the implementation of methods of environmental risk assessment and contingency planning which allow for the performance of an integrated analysis of the problem.
The main objective of this research is the understanding and implementation of stochastic elements of the risk assessment framework into a pollution transport and fate model. A practical method for generating synthetic wind time series based on wind rose information was implemented and a large number of these time series were applied within simulations. Tests have shown that the statistics of the synthetically generated wind time series are consistent with the original wind rose information. The present approach requires further refinements to improve the accuracy of all wind statistics of the synthetically generated wind data.
Oil probabilities maps, affecting receptor areas such as sensitive coastlines, were developed. Probabilities of the presence of oil, when released from multiple sources, were calculated and resulted in receptor risk maps.
During the study, an initial application of reversed modelling for the development of source-risk maps has been performed. The latter has shown to be a very efficient way of generating source-risk maps. Further research and development are required to obtain a fully operational tool. The reversed modelling in particular will require further development. The generation of synthetic wind time series requires a better statistical foundation as well. Moreover, the methods should be embedded in a GIS environment to achieve a fully operational tool that is suited to practical applications. |
