Analyzing the impact of metocean conditions on marine oil spill response

Planning for oil spill response and other marine activities requires a keen understanding of the weather and other conditions that can be expected in a given area and in a given period of time. It also requires consideratios about how those conditions — wind, waves, visibility, sea ice, etc. — may challenge or preclude on-water operations. The response viability analysis methodology matches data from a compilation of historic environmental conditions with the operational limits of a range of different oil spill response systems. The fundamental principle in the methodology recognizes the fact that deploying and operating oil spill response systems in a marine environment will be limited by conditions. By assembling a comprehensive dataset with relevant parameters and sufficient data quality, the extent of that impact can be assessed quantitatively. The dataset can be established for one or several single locations, or for continuous areas represented by a gridded data structure. Once the dataset is prepared, it can be used to analyze the viability of any activity that has operational limits based on the same parameters that are in the dataset. Response viability results are presented as percentage of time that conditions in the dataset are observed to be favorable, marginal, or unfavorable for different marine oil spill response systems. This approach has been applied over the past 10 years in several parts of Alaska, both Arctic and west coast Canada, Greenland, the Barents Sea, and the entire circumpolar Arctic region. An analysis of the Gulf of Mexico is currently underway. This paper will provide an overview of the approach and its applications, example results, changes over time, and reflections on potential future directions. It will also discuss inherent limitations to the approach and areas ripe for improvement, such as better defining operational limitations for different systems, expanding the activities to which the approach is applied, and expanding the tools used to present the results.