GNOME and LBM Model Evaluation on Ocean Oil Spill Far-Field Impacts to Highly Sensitive Areas

Abstract: In case of an ocean oil spill, there are certain areas, e.g. shrimp farms, which are highly sensitive to small amounts of oil pollution while they are geographically far from the spill. We investigate the Lattice Boltzmann Method (LBM) and GNOME, a tool developed and used by NOAA, in terms of far-field impacts to sensitive areas. We present our simulation results of both models in limited scale (a sub area of Gulf of Mexico) under the same oil spill condition using real ocean current data from the Unified Wave Interface-Coupled Model (UWIN-CM). Our study shows that the kinetic theory based LBM model outperforms the stochastic particle based GNOME model in accuracy and computation time due to their fundamental difference in representation of oil pollution advection and diffusion mechanisms. We propose LBM as a viable alternative to the Lagrangian particle calculation component of GNOME in modeling the far-field impacts to highly sensitive areas.